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Library of The Theological Seminary 


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‘BT 1101 .B87 1877. 
Bushnell, Horace, 1802-1876 
Nature and the supernatural 


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CHRIST AND HIS SALVATION. 
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VICARIOUS SACRIFICE. Vol. I. 
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NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 


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BY 
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 


As the naturalistic theories and destructive criticisms of the 
Gospels are becoming more popularized and obtaining a wider 
circulation, a cheaper edition of this treatise caine to be called 
for. In this form, accordingly, it is now submitted to the pub- 
lic; in the hope that it may reach another class of readers, and 
extend the range of whatever good effects it may be expected ta 
produce. | 

A good many critical notices and reviews—the greater part 
of them sufficiently favorable—have been bestowed upon this trea- 
tise; and in those which have been less favorable, I have met with 
nothing that has at all shaken my confidence in the argument, 
On the contrary, it seems rather to have come out experimentally 
proved, The objections it has thus far encountered have all come 
from the believing side, and not from the side of the adversaries— 
representing, simply, points of dissatisfaction, that arise from my 
not managing the subject matter of the question according to the 
prepossessions or favorite modes of the objectors. I am not aware 
that any single notice of my argument has ever been put forth on 
the side of naturalism—whether because it has been too little or 
too much respected, or because it is the manner of the writers on 
this side to take by assumption just what I am here concerned to 


disprove, I will not undertake to say; probably, however, the last 


iv PREFACE. 


mentioned is the true reason. They have come, in fact, to look 
upon this prior question, the question of the possibility, or possible 
credibility, of what is supernatural, as being virtually given up to 
them—they have it even as by concession; for.though they 
know the supernatural verity of the Gospels to be still abundantly 
affirmed, they have learned to look for no argument that is not 
under a previous docm of failure, and so to assume, in quiet as- 
surance, the final closing up of the question. 

I think there was never any school of writers before, who 
could take so much by assumption, with so little misgiving; part- 
ly because we have trained them to it, by a certain habit of im- 
potency which they have learned to appreciate, and partly be- 
cause an immensely overgrown personal conceit is required, to set 
any man to the taking down of the Lord Jesus by criticism. Other 
forms of disbelief, or denial, have drawn their argument from 
generally accepted premises; but the critical deniers take new 
premises by assertion, or by a supposed sharpness of insight not 
given to other men. This is true, in a remarkable degree, of 
Hennel, and Parker, and Strauss, but more especially still of M. 
Renan, in his late brilliant work on the Life of Jesus. The mir- 
acles of Christ are dismissed by him, with scarcely a show of dis- 
cussion, over and above the simple regret expressed, that some 
committee could not have been raised, to report upon them, and 
perhaps to have them repeated! Beginning in this very superla- 
tive key of confidence, he tosses the four Evangelists away to the 
right and the left, by the dashing cavalry assault of his judgments, 
and, rescuing Jesus from then, takes Him into the particular pat- 
ronage of his own finer and more qualified appreciation! I recol- 


lect no example of opinionative wisdom more amazing, or more 
_ 


eS a 


PREFACE. Vv 


nearly sublime. It is the authority of M. Renan against the 
authority of Christ, and the critic carries the day! 

Probably nothing can ever stop this kind of extravagance, but 
to let it have its way, and go on to the point of exhaustion. The 
audacity of it has a certain spice of interest, but the din it makes, 
by long hammering on our reverence, will grow wearisome enough 
probably, even before it has lost breath and can no farther go, 
Meantime it is none the less to be regretted that we give so good 
occasion for this kind of assumption, by setting ourselves in just 
the position that is weakest for assault, and most incapable of de- 
fence—a complete surrender, in fact, only not running up the flag. 

Thus we let everything turn, how often, upon the credit of 
the poor Evangelists, without allowing the Master himself to fur- 
nish any chief part of the story, by the really astonishing self-evi- 
dence of His character. 

We make up an issue for inspiration so stringently close and 
verbal, that we take the short end of the lever ourselves, and give 
the long end to our adversaries; consenting that if we fail on syl- 
lables, they shall have their own way about chapters and books. 

We assert the supernatural in a way too fantastic and ghostly 
to admit a possible defence, and then, if an assault breaks through, 
where there is, in fact, no line to break, we expect by some 7e- 
ductio ad absurdum, or fetch of negation keenly put, to maintain 
what never can or even ought to be maintained by any but the 
broadest and most positive methods of doctrine. 

We define miracles to be suspensions of the laws of nature, and 
make it impossible, gratis, from that time forth, to offer an argu 
ment for them, which any bravely rational person, or mind well 


grounded in science, can ever be expected to admit. 
Ca 


vi PREFACE. 


- And then we come in finally, in due course, to surrender, in 
fact, the credibility of anything supernatural or miraculous, by re- 
nouncing the credibility of any such thing occurring now. The 
credibility of all such wonders we think is according to the ratio 
of their distance; which is the same as ic admit that they are, in 
tact, credible nowhere. 

I do not complain, at this point, of the disrespect this volume 
has encountered with some, on the scure of its fourteenth chapter 
—“ Miracles and Spiritual Gifts not Discontinued.” I understood 
as well beforehand as now, at what cost it was to be inserted, and 
I thank God that I was able to stand by the Maiu Question at the 
point where it really turns—my fidelity in which has beeu duly 
appreciated by several of the most competent critics. We can 
never put a stop to the bold assumption which takes for granted 
the incredibility of supernatural inspirations and miracles, till we 
dare to bring down the question of fact, and have it for at least an 
open question now. Our timidity here loses everything. If the 
followers of Christ had courage to assert that, as Elias was a man 
of like passions with us, so we are men of like passions with him, 
and that God isthe same God that He was, giving us the same foot- 
ing with himself; if we could stand up squarely to the doctrine that 
God answers prayer in just the same way that he did of old; if we 
could even rejoice in the confidence that Stephen Grellet, and 
John Woolman, and Gilbert Tennent, and a long roll of the Scots 
Worthies, had their revelations outside of the canon, just as truly 
as Paul and John inside, and that possibly there have been as 
good ecstasies in our day, as they had in theirs, putting the disct- 
ple in as proper doubt whether he was in the body or out of the 


body; if we could say with Luther, ‘‘ How often has it Lappened, 


Se 


PREFACE. Pia 


and still does, that devils have been driven out in the name of 
Christ, also, by the calling of his name and prayer, that the sick 
have been healed! ’—holding generally such a ground as this, we 
should no more be offended, as now, every few days, by another 
and still ancther denier of the Gospels, beginning at an assumption 
which really takes everything for granted that is at issue between 
us. 

What I advanced on this subject, in the chapter reforred to, 
was not designed as an avowal of my fixed belief in any of the 
particular facts there recited, but simply to show how we are 
iiving always on the confines, so to speak, between the natural 
and the supernatural, and that whoever will have his eyes oper 
will see matters enough occurring, which it may not be the noblest 
candor, or even the truest intelligence, to set down as cases only 
of illusion. I am not ignorant that in opening this gate of heaven 
80 long shut, we should make room for illusions and delusions 
without number. And so, in fact, does Christianity itself, What 
kind of religion would it be that, to keep out the fact of delusion, 
should forbid even the possibility of delusion? A full half the 
value of our Christian experience lies in the fact, that we can be 
entb.usiasts, visionaries, fanatics, false prophets, or wild mystics, 
and notwithstanding learn how not to be. On the other hand, 


may God save us from a gospel that will keep us back from such 


kind of flightiness by giving us no air to breathe, lest we soma 


time fly away in it! How many miserable and really foolish 
delusions are the result of our private judgment, or intellectua. 
liberty! Why not stifle also this? No; the very thing we most 
want, in these times, is that kind of reverence and open docility 


that looks for great and divine things, glorious incomings of God-- 


Vill PREFACE. 


gifts, and wonders, and powers from on high—occursing now 
Nothing but the liberty of believing much will save us from be- 
lieving nothing. And if, to save us from the mischance of believ- 
ing too much, we are forbidden to believe anything, or any but 
some old thing, let us not wonder if there come about us swarms 
of unbelievers that reject the old things too, 


H. B. 
May, 1864, 


ee ee a ee eee ee eee ee 


ae | : | : | 


PREFACE 


THE treatise here presented to the public was written, as regards 
the matter of it, some years ago. It has been ready for the press 
more than two years, and has been kept back, by the limitations I 
am under, which have forbidden my assuming the small additional 
care of its publication. It need hardly be said that the subject 
has been carefully studied, as any subject rightfully should be, 
that raises, for discussion, the great question of the age. 

Scientifically measured, the argument of the treatise is rather 
an hypothesis for the matters in question, than a positive theory of 
them. And yet, like every hypothesis, that gathers in, accommo- 
dates, and assimilates, all the facts of the subject, it gives, in that 
one test, the most satisfactory and convincing evidence of its prac- 
tical truth. Any view which takes in easily, all the facts of a sub- 
ject, must be substantially true. Even the highest and most diffi- 
cult questions of science are determined in this manner. While it 
is easy therefore to raise an attack, at this or that particular point, 
call it an assumption, or a mere caprice of invention, or a paradox, 
or a dialectically demonstrable error, there will yet remain, after 
all suck particular denials, the fact that here is a wide hypothesis 
of the world, and the great problem of life, and sin, and super- 
natural redemption, and Christ, and a christly Providence, and a 


divinely certified history, and of superhuman gifts entered into the 


iv " PREFACE. 


world, and finally of God as related to all, which liquidates these 
stupendous facts, in issue between Christians and unbelievers, and 
gives a rational account of them. And so the points that were 
assaulted, and perhaps seemed to be carried, by the skirmishes of 
detail, will be seen, by ore who grasps the whole in which they 
are comprehended, to be still not carried, but to have their reason 
certified by the more general solution of which they are a part. 
One who flies at mere points of detail, regardless of the whole to 
which they belong, can do nothing with a subject like this, The 
points themselves are intelligible only in a way of comprehension, 
or as being seen in the whole to which they are subordinate. 

It will be observed that the words of scripture are often cited, 
and its doctrines referred to, in the argument. But this is never 
done as producing a divine authority on the subject in question. 
It is very obvious that an argument, which undertakes to settle the 
truth of scripture history, should not draw on that history for its - 
proofs. The citations in question are sometimes designed to correet 
mistakes, which are held by believers themselves, and are a great ~ 
impediment to the easy solution of scripture difficulties ; some- 
times they are offered as furnishing conceptions of subjects, that 
are difficult to be raised in any other manner; sometimes they are. 
presented because they are clear enough, in their superiority, to 
stand by their own self-evidence and contribute their aid, in that 
manner, to the general progress of the argument. 

I regret the accidental loss of a few references that could not 


be recovered, without too much labor. HB. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTORY—QUESTION STATED. 


MANKIND nattrally dredisposed to believe in supernatural facts, 13. Neolo- 
gists spring up, whom the Greeks called Sophists, 14. The Romans 
had their Sophists also, 15... And now the turn of Christianity is come, 
16. The naturalism of our day reduces Christianity to a myth, in the 
same way, 17. This issue is precipitated by modern science, 19. With 
tokens, on all sides, adverse to Christianity, 21. First, we have the athe- 
istic scl.ool of Mr. Hume, 22. Next, Pantheism, 23. Next, the Phys- 
icalists, represented by Phrenology, 23. The naturalistic characters of 
Unitarianism, 24. The Associationists, 24. The Magnetic necromancy, 
25. The classes mostly occupied with the material laws and forces, 25. 
Modern politics, 26. The popular literature, 28. Evangelical teachers 
fall into naturalism, without being aware of it, 28. But we undertake 
no issue with science, 29. Our object is to find a legitimate place for the 
supernatural, as included in the system of God, 31. And this, with an - 
ultimate reference to the authentication of the gospel history, 32 


CHAPTER II. 


DEFINITIONS—NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 


Nature defined, 36. The supernatural defined, 37. Do not design to 
limit, or deny the propriety of other uses, 38. Definition makes us su- 
pernatural beings ourselves, 42. Our supernatural action illustrated, 43. 
We operate supernaturally, by making new conjunctions of causes, 45. 
Not acted on ourselves, by causes that are efficient through us, 46. Not 
scale-beams, in our will, as governed necessarily by the strongest mo- 
tive, 47. In wrong, we consciously follow the weakest motive, 49. The 
other functions of the soul, exterior to the will, are a nature, 51. Atlan- 
tic Monthly on executive limitations of power, 53. And yet we are con- 
scious, none the less, of liberty, 55. Self-determination indestructible, 56. 
Hence the honor we put on heroes and martyrs, 57. If we act supernat- 
urally, why not also God? 59. Not enough that God acts in the causes 
of nature, 60. 


CHAPTER ITI. 
NATURE IS NOT TEE SYSTEM OF GOD—THINGS AND POWERS, HOW RELATED 


Nature oppresses our mind, at first, by her magnitudes, 64. Men, after eal, 
demand something supernatural, 66. Hence the appetite we discover, 
for the demonstrations of necromancy, 67. Shelly, the atheist, makes a 
mythology, 67. The defect of our new literature, that it has and yields 
no inspiration, 63. The agreement of so many modes of naturalism, 
signifies nothing, oecause they have no agreement among themselves. 70, 

a : 


V1 CONTENTS. 


Familiarized to the subordination of causes in nature, that we may not 
be disturbed by the same fact in religion, 72. Strauss takes note of this 
fact when denying the possibility of miracles, 74. Geology shows that 
God thus subordinates nature, on a large scale, 76. In the creation 
of so many new races, in place of the extinct races, ds He crea- 
ted their germs, 78. But man must have been created in maturity, 7 9. 
The development theory inverts all the laws of organic and inorganic 
substance, 81. The aspect of nature indicates interruptive and preees 
forces, that are not in the merely mineral causes, 83. Distinction of 
Things and Powers, 84. Both fully contrasted, 86. Nature not the uni- 
verse, 86. A subordinate part or member of the great universal sys- 
tem, 87. The principal interest and significance of the universe is in the 
powers, 89. ; 


CHAPTER IY. 


PROBLEM OF EXISTENCE, AS RELATED TO THE FACT OF SIN. 


The world of nature, a tool-house for the practice and moral training of 
powers, 91. Their training, a training of consent, which supposes a 
power of non-consent, 7% e. sin, 92. Possibility of evil necessarily in- 
volved, 93. No limitation of omnipotence, 94. Why, then, does God 
create with such a possibility? 95. May be God’s plan to establish in 
holiness, in despite of wrong, 96. No breach of unity involved in his 
plan, 98. The real problem of existence is character, or the perfection 
of liberty, 99. Which require a trial in society, 100. And this an em- 
bodiment in matter, 101. Will the powers break loose from God, as they 
may? 103. God desires no such result, 104. When it comes, no sur- 
prise apon His plan, or annihilation of it, 105. Illustrated by the found- 
ing of a school, 105. No causes of sin, only conditions privative, 107. 
What is meant by the term, 109. First condition privative—defect of 
knowledge, 110. Have all categorical, but no experimental knowledge, 
1ll. The subject guilty, as having the former, without the latter, 114. 
Second condition privative—unacquainted with law, and therefore un- 
qualified for liberty, 117. A kind of prior necessity, therefore, that he 
be passed through a twofold economy, 119. Discover this twofold econ- 
omy in other matters, 120. A third condition privative, as regards social 
exposure to the irruptions of bad powers, 123. This fact admitted by 
the necromancers, 125. Sin then can not be accounted for, 128. No 
validity in the objection, that God has been able to educate angels with- 
out sin, 129. Proof-text in Jude explained by Faber, 130. No objec 
tion lies, that sin is made a necessary means of good, 133. The exisi- 
ence of Satan explained, or conceived, 134. The supremacy of God not 


diminished, but increased, by an eternal purpose to reduce the bad possi- 
bility, 137. 


CHAPTER YV. 


THE FACT OF SIN. 


All naturalism begins with some professed, or tacitly assumed, denial of the 
fact of sin, 142. On th:s point, Mr. Parker is ambiguous, 143. Fourier 
cenarges all evil against socicty, 145. Dr. Strauss, all against the individ- 
ual, and none against society, 146. The popular, pantheistic literature 
denies the fact of sin, 148. Appeal to observatior for evidence, 149 


CONTENTS. Vil 


We blame ourselves, as wrong-doers, 151. Our demonstrations show us 
to be exercised by th3 ¢ sciousness of sin, 154. We act on the suppo- 
sition that sin is ever to be expected, dreaded, provided against, 156. 
Forgiveness supposes the fact, 159. So the pleasure we take in satiz e, 160. 
So the feeling of sublimity in the tragic sentiment, 161. Solutions of- 
fered by naturalists, insufficient and futile, 162. They call it “ misdirec- 
tion,” but it is self-misdirection, therefore sin, 163. 


CHAPTER VI. 
THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 


Sin has two forces, a spiritual and a dynamic, 165. By the latter as a 
power of disturbance among causes, it raises storms of retribution against 
itself, 166. It also makes new conjunctions of causes, that are destruct- 
ive and disorderly, 169. So that nature answers to it with groans, 170. 
Thus it is with all the four great departments of lite, and first, with the 
soul, or with souls, 172. No law or function is discontinued, but all its 
functions are become irregular and discordant, 173. Similar effects in 
the body, or in bodies, 174. Hence disease, and, to some extent, certainly, 
mortality itself, 176, Society is disordered by inheritance, through the 
principle of organic unity involved in propagation, 177. Objection con- 
sidered, that God, in this way, does not give usa fair opportunity, 178. 
Two medes of production possible; by propagation, and by the direct cre- 
ation of each man, 179. The mode by propagation, with all its disad- 
vantages of hereditary corruption, shown to be greatly preferable, 179. 
And yet, in this manner, society becomes organically disordered, 183. 
Similar effects of mischief in the material world, 186. Not true that 
nature, as we know it, represents the beauty of God, 187. Swedenborg 
holds that God creates through man, 188. And somehow it is clear that 
the creation becomes a type of man, as truly as of God, 189. Battle 
‘of the ants, 191. Deformities generally, consequences of sin, 191. Not 
true that they are introduced to make contrasts for beauty, 193. 


CHAPTER VII. 
ANTICIPATIVE CONSEQUENCES. 


We find disorder, prey, deformity, in the world, before man’s arrival—what 
account shall be made of such a fact? 194. There are two modes of 
consequences, the subsequent, which are physical effects, and the antici- 
pative, which respect the same facts before the time, 196. Propose now 
the question of the anticipative consequences, 198. Evil beings in the 
world, before the arrival of man; how far disorders in it may be due to 
the effect of their sin, 199. Anticipative consequences just as truly con- 
Sequences, as those which come after, 200. Intelligence must give to- 
kens beforshand of what it perceives, 201. Agassiz and Dana—premed- 
itations and prophetic types, 202. Such anticipative tokens necessary, tc 
show that God understands his empire beforehand, 205. The more im- 
pressive, that they are fresh creations, to a great extent, as shown by Mr. 
Agassiz, 207. Misshapen forms shown by Hugh Miller to increase, as the 
era of man approaches—as in the serpent race and many kinds of fishes, 
208. God will moderate the pride of science, thus, by the facts of 
science, 210. The world as truly a conatus, as an existing fact, 211 


vill CONTENTS. 


The Pantheistic naturalism gives a different account of tiese deform: 
ties, 211. Which account neither meets our want, nor even explains the 
facts, 212. Sin is seen to be a very great fact, as it must be, if it is any 
thing, 214. Objection considered, that there was never, in this view, 
any real kosmos at all, 215. Unnature is the grand result of sin, 216 
The bad miracle has transformed the world, 218. 


CHAPTER YVIII. 


NO REMEDY IN DEVELOPMENT, OR SELF-REFORMATION, 


Two rival gospels, 221. The first, which is development, or the progress 
of the race, will not restore the fall of sin, 221. No race begins at the 
savege state, and in that state there is no root of progress, 223. All the 
advanced races appear, more or less distinctly, to have had visitations of 
supernatural influence, 225. If there is a law of progress, why are so 
many races degraded or extirpated? 226. The first stage of man is a 
crude state, and the advanced and savage races are equally distant from 
it, 227. Geology shows that God does not mend all disasters by devel- 
opment, 227. Healing is not development, 228. Generally associated 
with supernatural power, of which it is the type, 230. No one dares, in 
fact, to practically trust the development principle, whether in the state 
or in the family, 232. The second rival gospel proposes self-reformation 
or self-culture, with as little ground of hope, 234. No will-practice, or 
ethical observance, can mend the disorder of souls, 235. These can not 
testore harmony, 236. Nor liberty, 236. The only sufficient help, or 
reliance, is God, 237. There is really no speculative difficulty in the dis- 
abilities of sin, 238. Even Plato denies the possibility of virtue, by any 
mere human force, 241. Seneca, Ovid, Zenophanes, to tlie same effect, 244. 
Plato, Strabo, Pliny, all indicate a want of some supernatural light, or rev- 
elation, 245. The conversion of Clement shows the fact in practical ex- 
hibition, 246. 


.- 


CHAPTER IX. 


THE SUPERNATURAL COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE AND SUBJECT TO FIXED 
LAWS. 


The world is a thing, into which all the powers may rightfully act them- 
selves, 250. Children at the play of ball, a good image of this higher truth, 
251. Not the true doctrine of a supernatural agency, that God acts 
through nature, 254. Did not so act in producing the new races of ge- 
ology, 254. Office of nature, as being designed to mediate the effects im- 
plied in duties and wrongs, 255. Nature the constant, and the super- 
natural, the variable agency, 257. God really governs the world, and by 
a supernatural method, 258. Without this he has no liberty in nature, 
more than if it were a tomb, 259. Manifestly we want a God living and 
acting now, 260. And yet all this action of God, supposes no contraven- 
tion of laws, 261. Reasons why this is inadmissible, 261. Several kinds 
of law, but all agree in supposing the character of uniformity, 262. Thus 
we have natural law and moral law, but God’s supernatural action not 
determined by these, is submitted always to the law of his end, 264. 
His end being always the same, he will be as exactly submitted to it as 
nature tc her laws, 266. No returning here into the same circle as in 


CONTENTS. 1X 


uature, but a perpetually onward motion, 266. What occurs but once 
here, is done by a fixed law, 269. Many of the laws of the Spirit we 
know, 270. The idea of superiority in nature, as being uniform — cor- 
rected. 271. Also, the impression of a superior magnitude in nature, 
273. 


CHAPTER X. 


THE CHARACTER OF JESUS FORBIDS HIS POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION WITH MEN, 


The superhuman personality of Christ is fully attested by his character, 277. 
And the description verifies itself, 277. Represented as beginning with 
a perfect childhood. 278. Which childhood is described naturally, and 
without exaggerations of fancy, 280. Represented always as an inno- 
cent being, yet with no loss of force, 283 His piety is unrepentant, yet - 
successfully maintained, 285. He united characters which men are. never 
able to unite perfectly, 286. His amazing pretensions are sustained so as 
never even to shock the skeptic, 288. Excels as truly in the passive vir- 
tues, 292. Bears the common trials, in a faultless manner of patience, 293. 
His passion, as regards the time, and the intensity, is not human, 295. 
His undertaking to organize, on earth, a kingdom of God, is superhu- 
man, 298. His plan is universal in time, 300. He takes rank with the 
poor, and begins with them for his material, 301. Becoming the head 
thus of a class, he never awakens a partisan feeling, 304. His teachings” 
are perfectly original and independent, 306. He teaches by no human or 
philosophic methods, 308. He never veers to catch the assent of multi- 
tudes, 308. He is comprehensive, in the widest sense, 309. He is per- 
fectly clear of superstition in a superstitious age, 311. He is no liberal, 
yet shows a perfect charity, 312. The simplicity of his teaching is perfect, 
314. His morality is not artificial or artistic, 316. He is never anxious 
for his success, 317. He impresses his superiority and his real greatness 
the more deeply, the more familiarly he is known, 318. Did any such 
character exist, or is it a myth, or a human invention? 323. Is the char- 
acter sinless? 324. Mr. Parker and Mr. Hennel think him imperfect, 326. 
Answer of Milton to one of their accusations, 329. How great a matter 
that one such character has lived in our world, 331. 


CHAPTER XI. 


CHRIST PERFORMED MIRACLES. 


Miracles do not prove the gospel, but the problem itself is to prove the 
miracles, 333. General assumption of the skeptics, that miracles are in- 
credible—Spinoza, Hume, Strauss, Parker, 334. Miracles defined, 335. 
What miracle is not, 337. Some concessions noted of the deniers of - 
miracles-—Hennel, 339.. Also of Dr. Strauss, 340. His solution of the 
immediate and the mediate action of God, 341. . Proofs—That the super- 
natural action of man involves all the difficulties, 345. That sin is neat 
in appearance to a miracle, 346. That nature, assumed to be perfect and 
not-to bs interruptel by God, is in fact become unnature already, 348. 
That without something equivalent, the restoration of man is impossi- 
ble, 348. That nature was never designed to be the complete empire of 
God, 349. That if God has ever done any thing he may as well do a 
miracle now, 350. Then He is shown, even by science, to have performed 


CONTENTS. 


4 


miracles, 350. But the great proof is Jesus himseif, having power, 
without suspending any law of nature, 351, On an errand high encugh 
to justify miracles, 353. It is also significant that the deniers can make 
no account of the history, which is at all rational—Strauss, 355. Mr, 
Parker concedes the fact that Christ himself is a miracle, 357. Objectior 
—why not also maintain the ecclesiastical miracles? 359. That aecord- 
ing to our definition there may be false miracles, 360. That if they are 
credible in a former age, they also should be now, 361. That miracles 
are demonstratioas of force, 363. But we rest in Jesus the chief mira- 
cle, 365. 


CHAPTER XII. 


WATER-MARKS IN THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 


The most convincing evidence, that which is already on hand, as in water 
mark, undiscovered, 367. Principal evidence of the kind, the two econo- 
mies, letter and spirit, as being inherently necessary, 368. Overlooked 
by our philosophers, 369. More nearly discerned by the heathen, 370. 
Once thought of as necessary, the necessity is seen, 372. Scriptures an-’ 
ticipate all hunran wisdom here, 373. And, in this precedence; we dis- 
cover that they are not of man, 375. Another strong proof in the gos- 
pels, not commonly observed, that the supernatural fact of the incarna- 
tion is so perfectly and systematically carried out, 376. There is no such 
concinnity of facts in any of the mythological supernaturalisms, 376. It 
appears in a multitude of points, as in the name, gospel, 377. In the 
name, salvation, 378. In salvation by faith, 379. In justification by 
faith, 381. In the setting up of a kingdom of God on earth, 384. In 
the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and his works, as related to Christ 
and his, 385. In the doctrine of spiritual regeneration, 388. In the 
sacred mystery of the Trinity, 391. Hence Napoleon, Hennel, and oth- 
ers, express their admiration of the compactness and firm order of Chris- 
tianity, 396. Whence came this close, internal adaptation of parts in a 
matter essentially miraculous? 397. Only rational supposition, that» the 
fabric is all of God, as it pretends to be, 399. May see in Mormonism, 
Mchammedanism, and Romanism, what man can do in compounding su 
pernaturals, 400, 


CHAPTER XIII. 


THE WORLD IS GOVERNED SUPERNATURALLY, IN THE INTEREST OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY. 


There is but one God, who, governing the world, must do st coincidently 
with what he is doing in Christ, 405. And this Christ himself boldly 
aflirms, 406. Two kinds of Providence, the natural and supernatural-- 
nature the fixed term between us and God, 407. And then there is a vari- 
able mode, in which we come into reciprocal relation with God—this ig 
the supernatural, 408, And in this field, God rules for Christianity’s sake, 
409. The evidences are, first, that things do not take place as they 
‘should, if the effects of sin were left to the endless propagation of causes, 
411. Hence then, while the great teachers of the world and their schools 
disappear, Christianity remains, 412. Itself an institution, in the very 


CONTENTS. Xi 


current. of the flood, 414. A second evidence, that the events of the 
world show a divine hand, even that of Christ bearing rule, 415. The 
Jewish dispersion, the Greek philosophy already waning, the Greek 


‘tongue every where, the Roman Empire universal, a state of general 


peace, and so the way of Christ is made ready, 417. So with the events | 
that followed, 418. But what of the dark ages, and other adverse facts? 
421. Enough that this mystery of iniquity must work, till the gospel is 


- proved out, 422. Some events confessedly dark, and yet they might be 


If 


turned to wear a look of advantage, if only we could fathom the:r 
import, 425. A third evidence, in the spiritual changes wrought in 
men—difficult to change a character, 428. -The cases of Paul, Augustine, 
and others, 431. The changes are facts; if Christianity did not work 
them, a supernatural Providence did, for Christianity’s sake, 434. Not 
changed by their own ideas, 436. Not by theologic preconceptions—vase 
of a short-witted person—Brainard’s conjurer, &., 437. More satisfac- 
tory to conceive these results to be wrought by the Holy Spirit, which 
comes to really the same thing, 440. How the critics venture, with 
great defect of modesty, to show the subjects of such changes, that chey 
misconceive their experience, 443. 


CHA PT RReX TVs 


MIRACLES AND SPIKITUAL GIFTS ARE NOT DISCONTINUED. 


miracles are inherently incredible, nothing is gained by thrusting toem | 
back and cutting them short in time, 447. The closing up of the canon, 
no reason of discontinuance, 448. Certainly not discontinued, for this 
reason, in the days of Chrysostom, 448. There have been suspensions, 
here and there, but no discontinuance, 449. Does not follow that they 
will occur, in later times, in the exact way of the former times, 450. 
The reason of miracles, in that oscillation toward extremes, which be- 
longs to the state of sin, 452. First, we swing toward reason, order, 
uniformity; next, toward fanaticism, 453. Hence almost every appear- 
ance of supernatural gifts, that we can trace, has come to its end in some 
kind of excess, 455. Why it is that lying wonders are generally con- 
temporaneous, 456. The first thing impressed by investigation here, that 
miracles could not have ceased at any given date—no such date can be 
found, which they do not pass over, 460. Newman and the ecclesiastical 
miracles, 460. Miracles of the ‘Scots Worthies,” 461. Les Trembleurs 
des Cevennes, or French prophets, 462. Les Convulsionnaires de Saint 
Médard, 462. George Fox’s miracles, and those of the Friends, 463 
Abundance of such facts in our own time, as in premonitions, answers to 
prayer, healings, tongues, of the MacDonalds and the followers of Irving, 
467. Case of Miss Fancourt, 467. Not true that the verdict of the 
thinking men of our day is to. decide such a question, 468. The thinking 
men can make nothing of Joan of Arc, of Cromwell, and many other 
well-attested characters, 472. But why do we only hear of such at a 
distance ?—why not meet the persons, see the facts? 474. We do—Cup- 
tain Yonnt’s dream, 475. The testing of prayer by a physician, 477. 
vie to have had the tongues in H , and other gifts, 478. Case of 
healing by an English disciple, 479. Case of a diseased cripple made 
whole, 483. The visit of a prophet, 486. Obliged to admit that, while 
such gifts are wholly credible, they are not so easily believed by one 
whose miod is preoccupied by a contrary habit of expectation, 491. 


xi CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER XY. 


CONCIUSION STATED—USES AND RESULTS. 


Argument recapitulated, 493. It does not settle, or at all move the q'tes 
tion of inspiration, but sets the mind in a position to believe insp‘ration 
easily, 495. The mythical hypothesis virtually removed, without any 
direct answer, 496. Have not proved all the miracles, but miracles—let 
every one discuss the particular questions for himsélf, 497. Objectior 
that every thing is thus surrendered, 498. Relation of the argument to 
Mr. Parker’s, 499. Particularly to hig view of natural inspiration, 501. 
The argument, if carried, will also affect the estimate held of natural the- 
vlogy, or modify the place given it, 505. And preserve the positive in- 
stitutions by showing a rational basis for their authority, 509. And 
correct that false ambition of philanthropy, which dispenses with Chris- 
tianity as the regenerative institution of God, 512. And restore the true 
apostolic idea 2f preaching, 514. And require intellectual and moral 
philosophy to raise the great problem of existence, and recognize the fact 
of sin and supernatural redemption, 516. And, last of all, will give 
to faith and Christian experience that solid basis on which they may 
be expected to unfold greater results, 520. 


CHAPTER Tf. 


INTRODUCTORY—QUESTION STATED 


In the remoter and more primitive ages of the world, 
sometimes called mythologie, it will be observed that man- 
kind, whether by reason of some native instinct as yet 
uncorrupted, or some native weakness yet uneradicated, 
are abundantly disposed to believe in things supernatural. 
Thus it was in the extinct religions of Egypt, Phoenicia, 
Greece, and Rome; and thus also it still is in the existing 
mythologic religions of the Hast Under this apparently 
3 primitive habit of mind, we find men readiest, in fact, to 
believe in that which exceeds the terms of mere nature; 
in deities and apparitions of deities, that fill the heavens 
and earth with their sublime turmoil; in fates and furies; 
in nymphs and graces; in signs, and oracles, and incanta- 
tions; in “gorgons and chimeras dire.” Their gods are 
charioteering in the sun, presiding in the mountain tops, 
rising out of the foam of the sea, breathing inspirations 
in the gas that issues from caves and rocky fissures, loos- 
ing their rage in the storms, plotting against each other 
in the intrigues of courts, mixing in battles to give 
success to their own people or defeat the people of 
some rival deity. All departments and regions of tne 
world are full of their miraculous activity. Above 
ground, they are managing the thunders; distilling in 
showers, or settling in dews; ripening or blasting the 
harvests; breathing health, or poisoning the air with pesti- 
lential infections. In the ground they stir up volcanic 
fires, and wrestle in cad ne Rel that shake down cities. 


14 THE GREEK SOPHISTS 


In the deep world underground, they receive the shosts of 
departed men, and preside in Tartarean majesty over the 
realms of the shades. The unity of reason was nothing 
to these Gentiles. They had little thought of nature as 
an existing scheme of order and law. Every thing was 
supernatural. The universe itself, in all its parts, was 
only a vast theater in which the gods and demigods were 
acting their parts. 

But there sprung up, at length, among the Greeks, some 
four or five centuries before the time of Christ, a class of 
speculative neologists and rationalizing critics, called Soph- 
ists, who began to put these wild myths of religion to the 
test of argument. If we may trust the description of 
Plato, they were generally men without much character, 
either as respects piety or even good morals; a conceited 
race of Illuminati, who more often scoffed than argued 
against the sacred things of their religion. Still it was no 
difficult thing for them to shake, most effectually, the con- 
fidence of the people in schemes of religion so intensely 
mythical. And it was done the more easily that the more 
moderate and sober minded of the Sophists did not pro- 
pose to overthrow and obliterate the popular religion, but 
only to resolve the mythic tales and deities into certaim 
great facts and powers of nature; and so, as they pretended, 
to find a more sober and rational ground of support for 
their religious convictions. In this manner we are in- 
formed that one of their number, Eumerus, a Cyrenian, 
“resolved the whole doctrine concerning the gods into a 
history of nature.” * 

The religion of the Romans, at a later period, under: 
went a similar process, and became an idle myth, having 


* Neander, Vol. IL, p. 6. 


AND THEIR TIMES. 15 


no earnest significance and as little practical authority in 
the convictions of the people. And, when Christ came, 
the Sadducees were practicing on the Jewish faith in much 
the same way. As philosophy entered, religion was fall- 
ing everywhere before its rationalizing processes. It was 
poetry on one side and dialectics on the other; and the 
dialectics were, in this case, more than a match for the 


poetry, 


and the cheat of their pretensions are discovered. What 


as they ever must be, until their real weakness 


the Christian father, Justin Martyr, says of the Sophists 
of his time, was doubtless a sufficiently accurate account 
of the others in times previous, and may be taken as a 
faithful picture of the small residuum of religious convic- 
tion left by them all. “They seek,” he says, “to con- 
vince us that the divinity extends his care to the great 
whole and to the several kinds, but not to me and to you, 
not to men as individuals. Hence it is useless to pray to 
him; for every thing occurs according to the unchange- 
able law of an endless cycle.’”’* 

Or, we may take the declaration of Pliny, from the side 
of the heathen philosophy itself, though many were not 
ready to go the same length, preferring to retain religion, 
which they oftener called superstition, as a good instru- 
ment for the state and useful as a restraint upon the com- 
mon people. He says:—“ All religion is the offspring of 
necessity, weakness, and fear. What God is, if in truth 
he be any thing distinct from the world, it is beyond the 
compass of man’s understanding to know.” + 

Thus, between the destructive processes of reason enter- 
ing on one side to demolish, and Christianity on the other 


* Neander, Vol. L., p. 9. + Neander, Vol. I, p. 10. 


16 THE CHRISTIAN SOPHISTS, 


to offer itself as a substitute, the old mythologic religions 


fell, and were completely swept away. 


And now, at last, the further question comes, viz., 


whether Christianity itself is also, in its turn, to experi- 


ence the same fate, and be exterminated by the same or a 
closely similar process? Is it now to be found that Chris- 
tianity is only another form of myth, and is it so to be re- 
solved into the mere “history of nature,” as the other re- 
ligions were before it? Is it now to be discovered that the 
propLecy and miracle of the Old Testament, and all the 
formally -historic matters even of the gospels and epistles 
of the New, are reducible to mere natural occurrences, 
“under the unchangeable laws of an endless cycle?” 
Is this process now to end in the discovery, beyond 
which there. can be no other, that God himself is, in 
truth, nothing “distinct from the world?” 

This is the new infidelity: not that rampant, crude- 
minded, and malignant scoffing which, in a former age, 
undertook to rid the world of all religion; on the contrary, 
it puts on the air and speaks in the character of a genuine 
scholarship and philosophy. It simply undertakes, if we 
can trust its professions, to interpret and apply to the facts 
of scripture the true laws of historic criticism. It more 
generally speaks in the name of religion, and does not 
commenly refuse even the more distinctive name of Chris- 
tianity. Coming thus in shapes of professed deference to 
revealed religion, many persons appear to be scarcely 
aware of the questions it is raising, the modes of thought 
it is generating, and the general progress toward mere 
naturalism it is beginning to set in motion. Many, also, 
are the more effectually blinded to the tendency of the 


ee a ee a ee 


ee 


a 


—— 
— 


ay tek 


OR NATURALIZING CRITICS, ies 


times, that so many really true opinions and so many right 
sentiments, honorable to God and religion, are connected 
with the pernicious and false method by which it is, in one 
way or another, extinguishing the faith of religion in the 
_ world. It proposes to make a science of religion, and 
what can be more plausible than to have religion become 
a science? 

It finds a religious sentiment in all men, which, in one 
view, isatruth. It findsa revelation of God in all things, 
which also is a truth. It discovers a universal inspiration 
of God in human souls; which, if it be taken to mean 
that they are inherently related to God, and that God, in 
the normal state, would be an illuminating, all-moving 
presence in them, is hkewise a truth. It rejoices also in 
the discovery of great and good men, raised up in all 
times to be seers and prophets of God; which, again, is 
not impossible, if we take into account the possibility of a 
really supernatural training or illumination, outside of the 
Jewish cultus; as in the case of Jethro, Job, and Cornelius, 
including probably Socrates and many others like him, 
who were inwardly taught of God and regenerated by the 
private mission ef his Spirit. 

But exactly this the new infidelity can not allow. All 
pretenses of a supernatural revelation, inspiration, or ex- 
perience, it rejects; finding a religion, beside which there 
is no other, within the terms of mere nature itself; a uni- 
versal, philosophic, scientific religion. In this it luxuri- 
ates, expressing many very good and truly sublime senti- 
ments; sentiments of love, and brotherhood, and worship; 
quoting scripture, when it is convenient, as it quotes the 
Orphic hymns, or the Homeric and Sibylline verses, and 
testifying the profoundest admiration to Jesus Christ, in 

Q* 


paras PRESENT TENDENCIES, 


common with Numa, Plato, Zoroaster, Confucius, Mohany — 
med, and others; and perhaps allowing that he is, on the 
whole, the highest and most inspired character that has 
ever yet appeared in the world. All this, on the level of 
mere nature, without miracle, or incarnation, or resurrec: 
tion, or new-creation, or any thing above nature. Such 
representations are only historic myths, covering perhaps 
real truths, but, as regards the historic form, incredible, 
Nothing supernatural is to be admitted. Redemption it- 
self, considered as a plan to raise man up out of thraldom, 
under the corrupted action of nature,—rolling back its 
currents and bursting its constraints,—is a fiction. There 
is no such thraldom, no such deliverance, and so far Chris- 
tianity is a mistake; a mistake, that is, in every thing that 
constitutes its grandeur as a plan of salvation for the 
world. 

We have heard abundantly of these and such like aber- 
rations from the christian truth in Germany, and also in 
the literary metropolis of our own country. But we have 
not imagined any general tendency, it may be, in this 
direction, as a peculiarity of our times. If s0, we have a 
discovery to make; for, though it may not be true that 
any large proportion of the men of our times have dis- 
tinctly and consciously accepted this form of unbelief, yet 
_ the number of such is rapidly increasing, and, what is 
worse, the number of those who are really in it, without 
knowing it, is greater and more rapidly increasing still. 

The current is this way, and the multitudes or masses of 
— the age are falling into it. Let us take our s survey of the 
forms of doubt or denial that are converging on this com- 
mon center and uniting, as a common force, against the 
faith of any thing supernatural, and so against the possi- 


CREATED BY SCIENCE, 19 


bility, in fact, of Christianity as a gospel of salvation to 
the world. 


From the first moment or birth-time of modern science, 
if we could fix the moment, it has been clear that Chris- 
tianity must ultimately come into a grand issue of life and 
death with it, or with the tendencies embodied in its pro- 
egress. Not that Christianity has any conflict with the 
facts of science, or they with it. On the contrary, since 
both it and nature have their common root and harmony 
‘in God, Christianity 1s the natural foster-mother of science, 
and science the certain handmaid of Christianity. And 
both together, when rightly conceived, must constitute one. 
complete system of knowledge. But the difficulty is here; 
that we see things only in a partial manner, and that the 
two. great modes of thought, or intellectual methods, that 
of Christianity in the supernatural department of God’s 
plan, and that of science in the natural, are so different 
that a collision is inevitable and a struggle necessary to 
the final hquidation of the account between them; or, 
what is the same, necessary to a proper settlement of the 
conditions of harmony. 

Thus, from the time of Galileo’s and Newton’s discove- 
ries, down to the present moment of discovery and research 
in geological science, we have seen the Christian teach- 
ers stickling for the letter of the Christian documents and 
alarmed for their safety, and fighting, inch by inch and 
with solemn pertinacity, the plainest, most indisputable or 
even demonstrable facts. On the other side, the side of 
science, multitudes, especially of the mere diletant, have 
been boasting, almost every month, some discovery that 
was to make a fatal breach upon revealed religion. 


20 OR THE METHOD OF SCIENCE. 


And aimuch greater danger to religion is to be appre 
hended from science than this, viz., the danger that comes 
from what may be called a bondage under the method of 
science,—as if nothing could be true, save as it is proved 
by the scientific method. Whereas, the method of all the 
higher truths of religion is different, being the method of 
faith; a verification by the heart, and not by the notions 
of the head. 

Busied in nature, and profoundly engrossed with her 
phenomena, confident of the uniformity of her laws, 
charmed with the opening wonders revealed in her pro- 
cesses, armed with manifold powers contributed to the 
advancement of commerce and the arts by the discovery 
of her secrets, and pressing onward still in the. inquest, 
with an eagerness stimulated by rivalry and the expecta- 
tion of greater wonders yet to be revealed,—occupied in 
this manner, not only does the mind of scientific men but 
of the age itself become fastened to, and glued down upon, 
nature; conceiving that nature, as a frame of physical 
order, is itself the system of God; unable to imagine any 
thing higher and more general to which it is subordinate. 
Imprisoned, in this manner, by the terms and the method 
of nature, the tendency is to find the whole system of God 
included under its laws; and then it is only a part of the 
same assumption that we are incredulous in regard to any 
modification, or seeming interruption of their activity, 
from causes included in the supernatural agency of per- 
sons, or in those agencies of God himself that complete 
the unity and true system of his reign. And so it comes to 

pass that, while the physical order called nature is perhaps 
only a single and very subordinate term-of that universal 
divine system, a mere pebble chafing in the ocean-bed of 


¢, 
Eee —— 


: 
: 
| 


THE REVISION PREPARING. 21 


its eternity, we refuse to believe that this pebble can be 
acted on at all from without, requiring all events and 
changes in it to take place under the laws of acting it has 
inwardly in itself. ‘There is no incarnation therefore, no 
miracle, no redemptive grace, or experience; for Gods 
system is nature, and it is incredible that the laws of 
nature should be interrupted; all which is certainly true, 
if there be no higher, more inclusive system under which 
it may take place systematically, as a result even of sys- 
tem itself. 3 

And exactly this must be the understanding of mankind, 
at some future time, when the account between Christianity 
_and nature shall have been fully liquidated. When that 
point is reached, it will be seen that the real system of God 
includes two parts, a natural and a supernatural, and it 
will no more be incredible that one should act upon the 
other, than that one planet or particle in the department 
of nature should act upon and modify the action of another. 
But we are not yet ready for a discovery so difficult to be 
-made. Thus far the tendency is visible, on every side, to 
believe in nature simply, and in Christianity only so far as 
it conforms to nature and finds shelter under its laws. And 
the mind of the christian world is becoming, every day, 
more and more saturated with this propensity to natural- 
ism; gravitating, as 1t were, by some fixed law, though 
imperceptibly or unconsciously, toward a virtual and real 
unbelief in Christianity itself; for the Christianity that is 
become a part only of nature, or is classified under nature, 
is Christianity extinct. That we may see how far the mind 
of an age is infected by this naturalizing tendency, let us 
note a few of the thousand and one forms in which it 


appears. 


22 ATHEISM NATURALISTIC, OF COURSE. 


First we have the relics of the old school of denial and 
atheism, headed most conspicuously by Mr. Hume and the 
French philosophers. All atheists are naturalists of neces 
sity. And atheism there will be in the world as long as 
sin 1s in it. If the doctrine dies out as argument, it will 
remain as a perverse and scoffing spirit. Or it will be re- 
produced in the dress of a new philosophy. Dying out as 
a negation of Hobbes or Hume, it will reappear in the 
positive and stolidly physical pretendership of Comte. 
But, whatever shape or want of shape it takes, destructive 
or positive,—a doctrine or a scoffing, a thought of the head 
or a distemper of the passions,—it will of course regard a 
supernatural faith as the essence of all unreason. 

Still it can not be said that the negations of Mr. Hume 
are gone by, as long as they are assumed and practically 
held as fundamental truths, by many professed teachers 
of Christianity; for it is remarkable that our most recent 
and most thorough-going school of naturalists, or natural- 
izing critics in the Christian scriptures, really place it as 
the beginning and first principle of criticism, that no 
miracle is credible or possible. This they take by assump- 
tion, as a point to be no longer debated, after the famous 
argument of Hume. ‘The works of Strauss, Hennel, New- 
man, Froude, Fox, Parker, all more or less distinguished 
for their ability, as for their virtual annihilation of the 
gospels, are together rested on this basis. ‘They are not 
all atheists; perhaps none of them will admit that distine- 
tion; some of them even claim to be superlatively chris- 
tian. But the assault upon Christianity, in which they 
agree, 1s the one from which the greatest harm is now to 
be expected, and that, in great part, for the reason that 

they do not acknowledge the true genealogy of their doe- 


PANTHEISTS AND PHRENOLOGISTS. 23 


trine, and that, hovering over the gulf that separates athe 
ism from Christianity, they take away faith from one, with: 
out exposing the baldness and forbidding sterility of the 
other. They have many apologies too, in the unhappy 
incumbrances thrown upon the christian truth by its de- 
fenders, which makes the danger greater still. 

Next we have the school or schools of pantheists; who 
identify God and nature, regarding the world itself and its 
history as a necessary development of God, or the con- 
sciousness of God. Of course there is no power out of 
nature and above it to work a miracle; consequently no 
revelation that is more than a devclopment of nature. 

Next in order comes the large and vaguely-defined body 
of physicalists, who, without pretending to deny Chris- 
tianity, value themselves on finding all the laws of obliga- 
tion, whether moral or religious, in the laws of the body 
and the world. The phrenologists are a leading school in 
this class, and may be taken as an example of the others. 
Human actions are the results of organization. Laws of 
duty are only laws of penalty or benefit, inwrought in the 
physical order of the world; and Combe “On the Con- 
stitution of Man” is the real gospel, of which Christianity 
is only a less philosophic version. Thousands of persons 
who have no thought of rejecting Christianity are sliding 
continually into this scheme, speaking and reasoning every 
hour about matters of duty, in a way that supposes Chris- 
tianity to be only an interpreter of the ethics of nature, 
and resolving duty itself, or even salvation, into mere pru- 
dence, or skill;—a learning to walk among things, so as 
not to lose one’s balarce and fall or be hurt; or, when it 
is lost, finding how to recover and stand up again. 

Closely related to these, or else included among them, 


24 ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS OF UNITARIANS. 


we are to reckon, with some exceptions, the very intelli- 
gent, influential body of Unitarian teachers of Christianity. 
Maintaining, as they have done with great earnestness, the 
truth of the scripture miracles, they furnish a singular and 
striking illustration of the extent to which a people may 
be slid away from their speculative tenet, by the practical 
drift of what may be called their working scheme. Deny- 
ing human depravity, the need of a supernatural grace 
also vanishes, and they set forth a religion of ethics, instead 
of a gospel to faith. Their word is practically, not re- 
generation, but self-culture. There is a good seed in us, 
and we ought to make it grow ourselves. ‘The gospel 
proposes salvation; a better name is development. Christ 
is a good teacher or interpreter of nature, and only so a 
redeemer. God, they say, has arranged the very scheme 
of the world so as to punish sin and reward virtue; there- 
fore, any such hope of forgiveness as expects to be deliv- 
ered of the natural effects of sin by a supernatural and 
regenerative experience, 1s vain; because it implies the 
failure of God’s justice and the overturning of a natural 
law. Whoever is delivered of sin, must be delivered by 
such a life as finally brings the great law of justice on his 
side. 'l'o be justified freely by grace is impossible.* 
Again, the myriad schools of Associationists take it as 
a fundamental assumption, whether consciously or uncon-. 
sciously, that nuraan nature belongs to the general order 
of nature, as it comes from God, and that nothing is want- 
ing to the full perfection of man’s happiness, but to have 
society organized according to nature, that is scientifically. 
No new-creation of the soul in good, proceeding from a point 
above nature, is needed or to be expected. The propensi: 


ns ee 


* Dewey’s Sermon or Retribution 


ASSOCIATIONISTS AND MAGNETISTS. 25 


ties and passions of men are all right now; “attractions 
are proportioned to destinies” ir them, as in the planets. 
What is wanted, therefore, is not the supernatural redemp- 
tion of man, but only a scientific reorganization of 
society. : 

Next we have the magnetists or scers of electricity, 
opening other spheres and conditions of being by electric 
impacts, and preparing a religion out of the revelations of 
natural clairvoyance and scientific necromaney; the more 
confident of the absurdity of the christian supernaturalism, 
or the plan of redemption by Christ, that they have been so 
mightily illuminated by the magnetic revelations. They are 
greatly elated also by other and more superlative discove- 
ries, in the planets and third heavens and the two superior 
states; boasting a more perfect and fuller opening of the 
other world than even Christianity has been able to make. 

Again it will be observed that almost any class of men, 
whose calling occupies them much with matter and its 
laws, have always, and now more than ever, a tendency to 
merely naturalistic views of religion. This is true of phy- 
sicians. Continually occupied with the phenomena of the 
body, and its effects on the mind, they are likely, without 
denying Christianity, to reduce it practically to a form of 
naturalism. So of the large and generally intelligent class 
of mechanics. Having it for the occupation and principal 
study of life to adjust applications of the great laws of 
chemistry and dynamics, and exercised but little in sub- 
jects and fields of thought external to mere nature, they 
very many of them come to be practical unbelievers in 
every thing but nature. They believe in cause and effect, 
and are likely to be just as much more skeptical in regard 
to any higher and better faith. Active-minded, ingenious, 


26 MATERIAL ENGAGEMENTS, 


and sharp, but restricted in the range of their exercise, 
they surrender themselves, in great numbers, to a feeling 
of unreality in every thing but nature. 

Again the tendency of modern politics, regarded as 
concerned with popular liberty, is in the same direction. 
Civil government is grounded, as the people are every day 
informed by their leaders, with airs of assumed statesman- 
ship, in a social compact; a pure fiction, assumed to 
account for whole worlds of fact; for every body knows 
that no such compact was ever formed, or ever supposed 
to be, by any people in the world. It has the advantage, 
nevertheless, of accounting for the political state, atheisti- 
cally, under mere nature; and is, therefore, the more 
readily accepted, though it really accounts for nothing. 
For if every subject in the civil state were in it as a real 
contractor, joining and subscribing the contract himself, 
what is there even then to bind him to his contract, save 
that, in the last degree, he is bound by the authority of 
God and the sanctions of religion. Besides there never 
can be, in this view, any such thing as legislation, but 
only an extended process of contracting; for legislation 
is the enactment of laws, and laws have a morally binding 
authority on men, not as contractors, but as subjects. It 
seems to be supposed that this doctrine of a social compact 
has some natural agreement with popular institutions, 
where laws are enacted by a major vote; whereas the 
major supposes a minor, non-assenting vote; and as this 
minor vote has been always a fact, from first to last, the 
compact theory fails, after all, to show how majorities get 
aright to govern that is better, even theoretically, than. 
the right of any single autocrat. There is, in fact, no con- 
ceivable basis of civil authority and law, which does not, 


POLITICS AND PROGRESS. 27 


recognize the state, as being, in this form or in that, a crea- 
tion of Providence and, as Providence manages the world 
in the interest of redemption, a fact supernatural; which 
does not recognize the state as God’s minister in the super: 
natural works and ends of his administration—appointed 
by him to regulate the tempers, restrain the passions, re- 
dress the wrongs, shield the persons, and so to conserve 
the order of a fallen race, existing only for those higher 
aims which he is prosecuting in their history. Still we 
are contriving, always, how to get some ground of civil 
order that separates it wholly from God. A social com- 
pact, popular sovereignty, the will of the people, any 
thing that has an atheistic jingle in the sound and stops in 
the plane of mere nature best satisfies us. We renounce, 
in this manner, our true historic foster-mother, religion, 
taking for the oracle and patron saint of our politics Jean 
Jacques Rousseau. And the result is that the immense 
drill of our political life, more far-reaching and powerful 
than the pulpit, or education, or any protest of argument, 
operates continually and with mournful certainty against 
the supernatural faith of Christianity. Hence too it is that 
we hear so much of commerce, travel, liberty, and the 
natural spread of great inventions, as causes that are start- 
ing new ideas, and must finally emancipate and raise all 
the nations of mankind. In which it seems to be sup- 
posed that there is even a law of self-redemption in society 
itself. Asif these external signs or incidents of progress 
were its causes also; or as if they were themselves un 
caused by the supernatural and quickening power of Christ, 
Whether Christianity can finally survive this death- -damp 
of naturalism in our political and social ideas, remains to 
be seen. 


258 REIGNING LITERATURE. 


I have only to add, partly as a result of ail these 
causes, and partly as a joint cause with them, that the 
popular literature of the times is becomin g generally satur- 
ated with naturalistic sentiments of religion. The litera- 
ture of no other age of the world was ever more religious in 
the form, only the religion of it is, for the most part, rather 
a substitute for Christianity than a tribute to its honor _— 
a piracy on it, as regards the beautiful and sublime pre 
cepts of ethics it teaches, but a scorner only the more 
plausible of whatever is necessary to its highest authority, 
as a gift from God to the world. It praises Christ, as great 
or greatest among the heroes; finds a God in the all, 
whom it magnifies in imposing pictures of sublimity; re- 
Joices in the conceit of an essential divinity in the soul 
and its imaginations; dramatizes culture, sentiment, and 
philanthropy ; and these, inflated with an airy scorn of all 
that implies redemption, it offers to the world, and 
especially to the younger class of the world, as a more 
captivating and plausible religion. 

To pursue the enumeration further is unnecessary. 
What we mean by a discussion of the supernatural truth 
of Christianity is now sufficiently plain. We undertake 
the argument from a solemn convictiou of its necessity, 
and because we see that the more direct arguments and 
appeals of religion are losing their power over the public 
mind and conscience. ‘This is true especially of the young, 
who pass into life under the combined action of so many 
causes, conspiring to infuse a distrust of whatever is super: 
natural in religion. Persons farther on in life are out of 
the reach of these new influences, and, unless their atten- 
tion is specially called to the fact, have little suspicion of 
what is going on in the mind of the rising classes of the 


ORTHODOXY NO SECURITY 29 


world,—more and more saturated every day with this in- 
-sidious form of unbelief. And yet we all, with perhaps 
the exception of a few who are too far on to suffer it, are 
more or less infected with the same tendency. Like an 
atmosphere, it begins to envelope the common mind of the 
world. We frequently detect its influence in the practical 
difficulties of the young members of the churches, who do 
not even suspect the true cause themselves, Indeed, there 
is nothing more common than to hear arguments advanced 
and illustrations offered, by the most evangelical preachers, 
that have no force or meaning, save what they get frora 
the current naturalism of the day. We have even heard 
a distinguished and carefully orthodox preacher deliver a 
discourse, the very doctrine of which was inevitable, un- 
qualified naturalism. Logically taken and carried out 40 
its proper result, Christianity could have had no ground 
of standing left,—-so little did the preacher himself under- 
stand the true scope of his doctrine, or the mischief that 
was beginning to infect his conceptions of the christian 
truth. 


In the review we have now sketched, it may easily be 
seen on what one point the hostile squadrons of unbelief 
are marching. Never before, since the inauguration of 
Christianity in our world, has any so general and moment- 
ous issue been made with it as this which now engages 
and gathers to itself, in so many ways, the opposing forces 
of human thought and society. Before all these combina: 
tions the gospel must stand, if it stands; and against all 
these must triumph, if it triumphs. Hither it must yield, 
or they must finally coalesce and become its supporters. 


Do we undertake then, with a presumptuous and even 
3% 


30 WHAT WE DO NOT ATTEMPT, 


preposterous confidence, to overturn all the science, argu: 
ment, influence of the modern age, and so to vindicate 
the supernaturalism of Christianity? By no means. We 
do not conceive that any so heavy task is laid upon us. 
On the contrary, we regard all these adverse powers as 
being, in another view, just so many friendly powers, 
every one of which has some contribution to make for the 
firmer settlement and the higher completeness of the chris- 
tian faith. They are not in pure error, but there is a dis- 
eoverable and valuable truth for us, maintained by every 
one, if only it were adequately conceived and set, as it will 
be, in its fit place and connection. Mr. Hume’s argu- 
ment, for example, contains a great and sublime truth ; 
viz., that nothing ever did or will take place out of sys- 
tem, or apart from law—not even miracles themselves, 
which must, in some higher view, be as truly under law 
and system as the motions even of the stars. Pantheism 
has a great truth, and is even wanted, as a balance of ree- 
tification to the common error that places God afar off, 
outside of his works or above, in some unimagined allti- 
tude. No doubt there is a truth somewhere in spiritism 
which will yet accrue to the benefit of Christianity, or, at 
least, to an important rectification of our conceptions of 
man. So of all the other schools and modes of naturalism 
that I have named. I have no jealousy of science, or any 
fear, whether of its facts or its arguments. For God, we 
may be certain, is in no real disagreement with himself, 
It is only a matter of course that, until the great account 
between Christianity and science is liquidated, there should 
be an appearance of collision, or disagreement, which does 
not really exist. As little do we propose to go into a des. 
ultory battle with the manifold schemes of naturalism 


AND WHAT WE Do, 3] 


above described ; still Jess to undertake a reconciliation of 
each or any of them with the christian truth. What ] 
propose is simply this; to find a legitimate place Jor the super: 
natural in the system of God, and show it as a necessary per 
of the divine system ttself. 

If Tam successful, I shall make out an argument for the 
supernatural in Christianity that will save these two con- 
ditions:—First, the rigid unity of the system of God; 
secondly, the fact that every thing takes place under fixed 
Jaws. I shall make out a conception both of nature and 
of supernatural redemption by Jesus Christ, the incar- 
nate Word of God, which exactly meets the magnificent 
outline-view of God’s universal plan, given by the great 
apostle to the Gentiles—“ And He is before all things, and 
by Him [in Him, it should be,] all things consist.” Chris- 
tianity, in other words, is not an afterthought of God, but 
a forethought. It even antedates the world of nature, and 
is “before all things,”—“ before the foundation of the 
world.” Instead of coming into the world, as being no 
part of the system, or to interrupt and violate the system 
of things, they all consist, come together into system, in 
Christ, as the center of unity and the head of the universal 
pian. The world was made to include Christianity ; under 
that becomes a proper and complete frame of order; to 
that erystalizes, in all its appointments, events, and expe- 
riences; in that has the design or final cause revealed, by 
which all its distributions, laws, and historic changes are 
determined and systematized. All which is beautifully 
and even sublimely expressed in the single word “con-sist,” 
a word that literally signifies standing together ; as when 
many parts coalesce in a common whole. Hence it is the 
more to be regretted that the translators, in the rendering 


a TO FORTIFY 


“by him,” instead of the more literal and exact rendering 
) 


‘im him,” have so far confused the significance and 
obscured the beauty of a passage that, properly translated, 
is so remarkable for the transcendent, philosophic szb- 
limity of its import. 

The same truth is declared more circumstantially and as 
much less succinctly in the gospel of John. “All things 
~ are made by Him, and without Him [2.e., apart from Him 
as the formal cause or regulative idea of the plan,] was 
not any thing made that was made.’ Or to the same 
effect,—‘‘ He was in the world,”—“ he came unto his own,” 
affirming that he was here before he came as the son of 
Mary; and that, when he came, he came not as an intruder, 
defiant of all previous order in nature, but as coming unto 
“his own,” to fulfill the creative idea centered in his per 


son, and to complete the original order of the plan. 


Such is the general object of the treatise I now under- 
take: and, if I am able, in this manner, to obtain a solid, 
intellectual footing for the supernatural, evincing not only 
the compatibility, but the essentially complementary rela: 
tion of nature and the supernatural, as terms included, ab 
origine, in the unity of God’s plan, or system, I shall, of 
course, produce a conviction, as much more decided and 
solid, of those great practical truths, which belong to the 
supernatural side of Christianity; such as incarnation, 
regeneration, justification by faith, divine guidance, and 
prayer ;—truths which are now held so feebly, and in a 
manner so timid and partial, as to rob them of their genu- 
ine power. Any-thing which displaces the present jeal- 
ousy of what is supernatural, or stiffens the timidity of 
faith, must, as we may readily see, be an important contré 


CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE, 33 


bution to christian experience and the practical life of 
religion. Nothing do we need so deeply as a new inav- 
guration of faith; or, perhaps I should rather say, a rein- 
auguration of the apostolic faith, and the spirit which dis- 
tinguished the apostolic age. And yet a reinauguration 
of this must, in some very important sense, be a new 
inauguration; for it can be accomplished only by some 
victory over naturalism, that prepares a rational founda- 
such as was not wanted, and 


tion for the supernatural 
was, therefore, impossible to be prepared, in the first age 
of the church. 

“Ibis scarcely necessary to add that, while I am looking 
with interest to the emboldening of faith in the great 
truths of holy experience, I have a particular looking in my 
argument toward the authentication of the christian scrip- 
tures, in a way that avoids the inherent difficulties of the 
question of a punctually infallible and verbal inspiration. 
These difficulties, I feel constrained to admit, are insuper- 
able; for, when the divine authority of the scriptures is 
made to depend thus on the question of their most rigid, 
strictest, most punctual infallibility, they are made, in fact, 
to stand or fall by mere minima and not by any thing 
principal in them, or their inspiration. And then what- 
ever smallest doubt can be raised, at any most trivial 
point, suffices to imperil every thing, and the main ques- 
tion is taken at the greatest possible disadvantage. The 
argument so stated must inevitably be lost; as, in fact, it 
always is. For it has even to be given up, at the outset, 
by concessions that leave it nothing on which to stand, 
For no sturdiest advocate of a verbal and punctual inspir- 
ation can refuse to admit variations of copy, and the prob- 
able or possible mistake of this or that manuscript, in a 


34. TO ESTABLISH 


transfer of names and numerals. It is equally difficult 
to withhold the admission, here and there, of a possible 
interpolation, or that words have crept into the text 
that were once in the margin. Starting, then, with a 
definition of infallibility, fallibility is at once and so far 
admitted. After all, the words, syllables, iotas of the 
book are coming into question,—the ivfallibility is logi- 
cally at an end even by the supposition. The moment 
we begin to ask what manuscript we shall follow? what 
words and numerals correct? what interpolations extir- 
pate? we have possibly a large work on hand, and 
where is the limit? Shall we stop short of giving up 
1 John, v., 7, or shall we go a large stride beyond, 
and give up the first chapters of Matthew and Luke? 
We are also obliged to admit that the canon was not 
made by men infallibly guided by the Spirit; and then 
the possibility appears to logically follow that, despite of 
any power they had to the contrary, some book may have 
been let into the canon which, with many good things, 
has some specks of error in it. Besides, if the question 
is thrown back upon us, at this point, we are obliged to ad- 
mit, and do, as a familiar point of orthodoxy, that our own 
polarities are disturbed, our judgment discolored, by sin; 
so that, if the book is infallible, the sense of it. as infallible 
is not and can not be in us; how then can we affirm it, 
or maintain it, in any such manner of strictness and exact 
perception? We could not even sustain the infallibility 
of God in this manner; 7. e. because we are able to know it, 
item by item, as comprehending in ourselves a complete 
sense of his imfallibility. We establish God’s infallibility 
only by a constructive use of generals, the particuiars of 


THE GOSPEL HISTORY. 85 


which are conceived by us only in the faintest, most par- 
tial manner. 

Now these difficulties, met in establishing a close and 
punctual infallibility, are rather logical than real, and 
originate not in any defect of the scriptures, but in a state- 
ment which puts us in a condition to make nothing of a 
good cause,—a condition to be inevitably worsted. Indeed 
there is no better proof of a divine force and authority in 
the scriptures, able to affirm and always affirming itself in 
its own right, even to the end of the world, than that they 
continue to hold their ground so firmly, when the speculat- 
ive issue joined in their behalf has been so badly chosen and, 
if we speak of what is true logically, so uniformly lost. 

I see no way to gain the verdict which, in fact, they 
have hitherto gained for themselves, but to change our 
method and begin at another point, just where they 
themselves begin; to let go the minima and lay hold of 
the principals;—those great, outstanding verities, in which 
they lay their foundations, and by which they assert them- 
selves. As long as the advocates of strict, infallible 
inspiration are so manifestly tangled and lost in the trivi- 
alities. they contend for, these portentous advances of 
naturalism will continue. And, as many are beginning 
already, with no fictitious concern, to imagine that Chris- 
tianity is now being put upon its last trial,—whether to 
stand or not they hardly dare be confident,—why should 
they be farther discouraged by adhering to a mode of trial 
which, in being lost, really decides nothing. Let the 
church of God, and all the friends of revelation, as a 
word of the Lord to faith, turn their thoughts upon an 
issue more intelligent and significant, and one that can be 
certainly sustained 


CHAPTER 11. 
DEFINITIONS- NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 


In order to the intelligent prosecution of our subject, 
we need, first of all, to settle on the true import of cer- 
tain words and phrases, by the undistinguishing and ¢on- 
fused use of which, more than by any other cause, the 
unbelieving habit of our time has been silently and im- 
perceptibly determined. They are such as these :—“na- 
ture,” “the system of nature,” “the laws of nature,” 
‘universal nature,” “the supernatural,” and the like. 
The first and last named, “nature” and the “supernatu- 
ral,” most need our attention; for, if these are carefully 
distinguished, the others will scarcely fail to yield us their 
true meaning. | 

Tne Latin etymology of the word nature, presents the 
true force of the term, clear of all ambiguity. The na- 
ture [natura] of a thing is the future participle of its 
being or becoming—its abovt-to-be, or its about to-come-ty 


pass,—and the radical idea is, that there is, in the thing 
whose nature we speak of, or in the whole of things called . 
nature, an about-to-be, a definite futurition, a fixed law of 
coming to pass, such that, given the thing, or whole of 
things, all the rest will follow by an inherent necessity, 
In this view, nature, sometimes called “ universal nature,” 
and sometimes “the system of nature,” is that created 
realm of being or substance which has an acting, a going 
on or process from within itself, under and by its own 
laws. Or, if we say, with some, that the laws are but an- 
other name for the immediate actuating power of God, 


NATURE DEFINED. 37 


still it makes no difference, in any other respect, with our 
conception of the system. It is yet as if the laws, the pow- 
ers, the actings, were inherent in the substances, and were 
by them determined. It is still to our scientific, separated 
from our religious contemplation, a chain of causes and 
effects, or a scheme of orderly succession, determined from 
within the scheme itself. 

Having settled, thus, our conception of nature, our con- 
ception of the supernatural corresponds. That is super- 
natural, whatever it be, that is either not in the chain of 
natural cause and effect, or which acts on the chain of 
cause and effect, in nature, from without the chain. Thug 
if any event transpires in the bosom, or upon the platform 
of what is called nature, which is not from nature itself, or 
is varied from the process nature would execute by her 
own laws, that is supernatural, by whatever power it is 
wrought. Suppose, for example, (which we may, for illus- 
tration’s sake, even though it can not be,) that there were 
another system of nature incommunicably separate from 
ours, some “famous continent of universe,” like that on 
which Bunyan stumbled, “as he walked through many 
regions and countries;” if, then, this other universe were 
swung up side by side with ours, great disturbance would 
result, and the disturbance would be, to us, supernatural, 
because from without our system of nature; for, though 
the laws of our system are acting, still, in the disturbance, 
they are not, by the supposition, acting in their own sys- 
tem, or conditions, but by an action that is varied by the 
forces and reciprocal actings of the other. So if the pro- 
cesses, combinations, and results of our system of nature 
are Interrupted, or varied by the action, whether of God, 


or angels, or men, so as to bring to pass what would not 
4 


38 ALSO THE SUPERNATURAL. 


come to pass in it by its own internal action, under the 
laws of mere cause and effect, the variations are, in like 
manner, supernatural. And exactly this we expect to 
show: viz., that God has, in fact; erected another and high- 
er system, that of spiritual being and government, for 
which nature exists; a system not under the law of cause 
and effect, but ruled and marshaled under other kinds of 
laws and able continually to act upon, or vary the action of 
the processes of nature. If, accordingly, we speak of sys- 
tem, this spiritual realm or department is much more prop- 
erly called a system than the natural, because it is closer to 
God, higher in its consequence, and contains in itself the 
ends, or final causes, for which the other exists and to which 
the other is made to be subservient. There is, however, a 
constant action and reaction between the two, and, strictly 
speaking, they are both together, taken as one, the true sys- 
tem of God; for a system, in the most proper and philo- 
sophic sense of the word, is a complete and absolute whole, 
which can not be taken asa part or fraction of any thing. 

We do not mean, of course, by these definitions, or dis- 
tinctions of the natural and supernatural. to assume the 
impropriety of the great multitude of expressions, in 
which these words are more loosely employed. ‘They may 
well enough be so employed; the convenience of speech 
requires it; but it is only the more necessary, on that ac- 
count, that we thoroughly understand ourselves when we 
use them in this manner. 

Thus we sometimes speak of “the system of nature,” 
using the word nature in a loose and general way, as com- 
prising all created existence. But if we accommodate 
eurselves in this manner, it behooves us to see that we do 
not, in using such a term, slide into a false philosophy 


LOOSER USES, 39 


which overturns all obligation, by assuming the real uni- 
versality of cause and effect, and the subjection of human 
actions to that law. It may be true that men are only 
things, determinable under the same conditions of causality, 
but it will be soon enough to assert that fact, when it is 
ascertained by particular inquiry; which inquiry is much 
more likely to result in the impression that the phrase, 
“system of nature,” understood in this manner as imply- 
ing that human actions are determined by mechanical laws, 
is much as if one were to speak of the “system of the 
school-house,” as supporting the inference that the same 
kind of frame-work that holds the timbers together, is 
also to mortise and pin fast the moral order of the school. 
In the same manner, we sometimes say “universal na- 
ture,” when we only catch up the term to denote the whole 
creation or universe, without deciding any thing in regard 
to the possible universality of nature properly defined. 
To this, again, there is no objection, if we are only care- 
ful not to slide into the opinion that natural laws and 
causes comprehend every thing; as multitudes do, without 
thought, in simply yielding to the force of such a term. 
The word “Nature,” again, is currently used in our 
modern literature as the name of a Universal Power; be it 
an eternal fate, or an eternal system of matter reigning by 
its necessary laws, or an eternal God who is the All, and 
is, in fact, nowise different from asystem of matter. Nature 
undergoes, in this manner, a kind of literary apotheosis, 
and receives the mock honors of a dilettantd worship, 
And the new nature-religion is the more valued, be- 
eause both the god and the worship, being creatures of the 
reigning school of letters, are supposed to be of a more 
superlative and less common qual:ty. But, though some- 


40 PERMISSIBLE WITH CAUTION. 


thing is here said of religion, with a religious air, the 
word nature, it will be found, is used in exact accordaace 
sull with its rigid and proper meaning, as denoting that 
which has its fixed laws of coming to pass within itself. 
The only abuse consists in the assumed universal extent 
of nature, by which it becomes a fate, an all-devouring 
abyss of necessity, in which God, and man, and all free 
beings are virtually swallowed up. If it should happen 
that nature proper has no such extent; but is, Instead, a 
comparatively limited and meager fraction of the true uni- 
verse, the new religion would appear to have but a very 
shallow foundation, and to be, in fact, a fraud, as pitiful 
as it is airy and pretentious. 

We also speak of a nature zn free beings, and count 
upon it as a motive, cause, or ground of certainty, in re- 
spect of their actions. ‘Thus we assign the nature of God, 
and the nature of man, as reasons of choice and roots of 
character, representing that it is “the nature of God” to 
be holy, or Gt may be,) “the nature of man to do wrong.” 
Nor is there any objection to this use of the word “ nature,” 
taken as popular language. There is, doubtless, in God, 
as a free intelligence, a constitution, having fixed laws, 
answering exactly to our definition of nature. That there 
is a proper and true naturein man we certainly know; for 
all the laws of thought, memory, association, feeling, in 
the human soul are as fixed as the laws of the heayenl y 
bodies. It is only the will that is not under the law of 
cause and effect; and the other functions are, by their laws, 
subordinated, in a degree, to the uses of the will and its 
directing sovereignty over their changes and processes, 
And yet the will, calling these others a nature, is in turn 
solicited and drawn by them, just as the expressions alluded 


LOOSER USES PERMISSIBLE, 41 


to imply, save that they have, in fact, no causative agency 
on the will at all. They are the will’s reasons, that in 
view of which it acts; so that, with a given nature, it may 
be expected, with a certain qualified degree of confidence, 
to act thus or thus; but they are never causes on the will, 
and the choices of the will are never their effects. 'There- 
fore, when. we say that it is “the nature of man to do 
this,” the language is to be understood in a secondary, 
tropical sense, and not as when we say that it is the nature 
of fire to burn or water to freeze. 

As little would I be understood to insist that the term 
supernatural is always to be used in the exact sense I have 
given it. Had the word been commonly used in this close, 
sharply-defined meaning, much of our present unbelief, or 
misbelief, would have been obviated; for these aberra- 
tions result almost universally from our use of this word 
in a manner so indefinite and go little intelligent. Instead 
of regarding the supernatural as that which acts on the 
chain of cause and effect in nature from without the chain, 
and adhering to that sense of the term, we use it, very 
commonly, in a kind of ghostly, marveling sense, as if 
relating to some apparition, or visional wonder, or it may 
be to some desultory, unsystematizable action, whether of 
angels or of God. Such uses of the word are permissible 
enough by dictionary laws, but they make the word an 
offense to all who are any way inclined to the rationalizing 
habit. On the other hand, there are many who claim to 
be acknowledged as adherents of a supernatural faith, with 
as little definite understanding. Believing in a God supe- 
rior to nature, acting from behind and through her laws, 
they suppose that they are, of course, to be classed ag be- 


lievers in a supernatural being and religion. But the 
4% 


42 _ DISTINCTION SEEN, 


genuine supernaturalism of Christianity signifies a great 
deal more than this; viz., that God is acting from without 
on the lines of cause and effect in our fallen world and 
our disordered humanity, to produce what, by no mere 
laws of nature, will ever come to pass. Christianity, 
therefore, is supernatural, not because it acts through the 
iaws of nature, limited by, and doing the work of, the 
laws; but because it acts regeneratively and new-creative- 
ly to repair the damage which those laws, in their penal 
action, would otherwise perpetuate. Its very distinction, 
as a redemptive agency, lies in the fact that it enters into 
nature, in this regenerative and rigidly supernatural way, 
to reverse and restore the lapsed condition of sinners. 


But the real import of our distinction between nature ~ 


and the supernatural, however accurately stated in words, 
will not fully appear, till we show it in the concrete; for 
it does not yet appear that there is, in fact, any such thing 
known as the supernatural agency defined, or that there 
are in esse any beings, or classes of beings, who are distin- 
euished by the exercise of such an agency. That what we 
have defined as nature truly exists will not be doubted, 
but that there is any being or power in the universe, who 
acts, or can act upon the chain of cause and effect in nature 
from without the chain, many will doubt and some will 
strenuously deny. Indeed the great difficulty heretofore 
encountered, in establishing the faith of a supernatural 
agency, has been due to the fact that we have made a 
ghost of it; discussing it as if it were a marvel of super- 
stition, and no definite and credible reality. Whereas, it 
will appear, as we confront our difficulty more thought: 
fully and take its full force, that the moment we begin to 


— a a 


IN THE WORLD OF FACT, 43 


conceive ourselves rightly, we become ourselves supernat- 
ural. It is no longer necessary to go hunting after mar- 
vels, apparitions, suspensions of the laws of nature, to 
find the supernatural; it meets us in what is least. trans- 
eendent and most familiar, even in ourselves. In our- 
selves we discover a tier of existences that are above ua- 
ture and, in all their most ordinary actions, are doing their 
will upon it. The very idea of our personality is that of 
a being not under the law of cause and effect, a being su- 
pernatural. This one point clearly apprehended, all the 
difficulties of our subject are at once relieved, if not abso- 
lutely and completely removed. 

If any one is startled or shocked by what appears to be 
the extravagance of this position, let him recur to our 
definition; viz., that nature is that world of substance, 
whose laws are laws of cause and effect, and whose events 
transpire, in orderly succession, under those laws; the su- 
pernatural is that range of substance, if any such there 
be, that acts upon the chain of cause and effect in nature 
from without the chain, producing, thus, results that, by 
mere nature, could not come to pass. It is not said, be it 
observed, as is sometimes done, that the supernatural im- 
plies a suspension of the laws of nature, a causing them, 
for the time, not to be—that, perhaps, is never done—it is 
only said that we, as powers, not in the line of cause and 
effect, can set the causes in nature at work, in new combi- 
nations otherwise never occurring, and produce, by our 
action upon nature, results which she, as nature, could 
never produce by her own internal acting. 

Illustrations are at hand without number. ‘Thus, na- 
ture, for example, never made a pistol, or gunpowder, or 
pulled a trigger; all which being lone, or procured to be 


44 SUPERNATURAL ACTION 


done, by the criminal, in his act of murder, he is hung for 
what is rightly called his unnatural deed. So of things 
not criminal; nature never built a house, or modeled a 
ship, or fitted a coat, or invented a steam-engine, or wrote 
a book, or framed a constitution. These are all events 
that spring out of human liberty, acting in and upon the 
realm of cause and effect, to produce results and combina- 


tions, which mere cause and effect could not; and, at some 


point of the process in each, we shall be found coming 
down upon nature, by an act of sovereignty just as per- 
emptory and mysterious as that which is discovered in a 
miracle, only that a miracle is a similar coming down upon 
it from anotherand higher being, and not from ourselves. 


Thus, for example, in the firing of the pistol, we find ma- 


terials brought together and compounded for making an 
explosive gas, an arrangement prepared to strike a fire into 
the substance’ compounded, an arm pulled back to strike 
the fire, muscles contracted to pull back the arm, a nerv- 


ous telegraph running down from the brain, by which some | 


order has been sent to contract the muscles; and then, 
having come to the end of the chain of natural causes, the 
jury ask, who sent the mandate down upon the nervous 
telegraph, ordering the said contraction? And, having 
found, as their true answer, that the arraigned criminal did 
it, they offer this as their verdict, and on the strength of 
the verdict he is hung. He had, in other words, a power 
to set in order a line of causes and effects, existing element- 
ally in nature, and then, by a sentence of his will, to start 
the line, doing his unnatural deed of murder. If it be 
inquired how he was able to command the nervous tele- 
graph in this manner, we can not tell,any more than we 
can show the manner of a miracle. The same is true in 


FAMILIAR 45 


regard to all our most common actions. If one simply 
lifts a weight, overcoming, thus far, the great law of gray- 
ity, we may trace the act mechanically back in the same 
way ; and if we do it, we shall come, at last, to the man 
acting in his personal arbitrament, and shall find him send- 
ing down his mandate to the arm, summoning its contrac: 
tions and sentencing the weight to rise. In which, as we 
perceive, he has just so much of power given him to vary 
the incidents and actings of nature as determined by her 
own laws—so much, that is, of power supernatural. 

And so all the combinations we make in the harnessing 
of nature’s powers imply, in the last degree, thoughts, 
mandates of will, that are, at some point, peremptory over 
the motions by which we handle, and move, and shape, 
and combine the substances and causes of the world. 
And to what extent we may go on to alter, in this man- 
ner, the composition of the world, few persons appear to 
consider. For example, it is not absurd to imagine the 
human race, at some future time, when the population 
and the works of industry are vastly increased, kindling 
so many fires, by putting wood and coal in contact with 
fire, as to burn up or fatally vitiate the world’s atmosphere. 
That the condition of nature will, in fact, be so far changed 
by human agency, is probably not to be feared. We 
only say that human agency, in its power over nature, 
holds, or may well enough be imagined to hold, the sover- 
eignty of the process. Meantime, it is even probable, as 
a matter of fact, that infections and pestilential diseases — 
invading, every now and then, some order of vegetable or 
animal life, are referable, in the last degree, to something 
done upon the world by man. For indeed we shall shew, 
before we have done, that the scheme of nature itself 


46 THE WILL IS NOT 


is a scheme unstrung and mistuned, to a very great de 
gree, by man’s agency in it, so as to be rather unnature, 
after all, than nature; and, for just that reason, demanding 
of God, even for system’s sake, in the highest range of 
that term, miracle and redemption. 

Suffice it, for the present, simply to clear, as well as we 
are able, this main point, the fact of a properly supernat- 
ural power in man. ‘Thus, some one, going back to the 
act by which the pistol was fired, will imagine, after. all, 
that the murderer’s act in the firing was itself caused in 
him by some condition back of what we call his choice, as 
truly as the explosion of the powder was caused by the 
fire. Then, why not blame the powder, we answer, as 
readily as the man—which most juries would have some 
difficulty in doing, though none at all in blaming the 
man? ‘The nature of the objection is purely imaginary, 
as, in fact, the common sense, if we should not rather say 
the common consciousness of the word decides; for we are 
all conscious of acting from ourselves, uncaused in our ae- 
tion. The murderer knows within himself that he did the 
deed, and that nothing else did it through him. So his 
consciousness testifies—so the consciousness of every man 


revising his actions—and no real philosopher will ever 
undertake to substitute the verdict of consciousness, by 
another, which he has arrived at only by speculation ora 
logical practice in words. The sentence of consciousness 
is final. 

Hence the absurd and really blamable ingenuity of those 
would-be philosophers who, not content with the clear, 
indisputable report of consciousness in such a case, go on 
to ask whether the wrong-doer of any kind was not act 


ing, in his wrong, under motives and determined by 


A SCALE-BEAM. 47 


the strongest motives, and, since he is a being made to 
act in this manner, whether, after all, he really acted 
himself, any more than other natural substances do 
when they yield to the strongest cause? Doubtless he 
acted under motives, and probably enough he felt 
beside that half his crime was in his motive, being that 
which his own bad heart supplied. The matter of the 
strongest motive is more doubtful; but, if it be true, in 
every case, that the wrong-doer chooses what to him is the 
strongest motive, it by no means follows that he acts in the 
way of a scale-beam, swayed by the heaviest weight; 
for the strength of the motive may consciously be derived, 
in great part, from what his own perversity puts into it; 
and, what is more, he may be as fully conscious that he 
acts, in every case, from himself, in pure self-determina- 
tion, as he would be if he acted for no motive at all. Con- 
sciously he is not a scale-beam, or any passive thing, but a 
self-determining agent; and if he looks out always for the 
strongest motive, he still as truly acts from his own person- 
al arbitrament as if he were always pursuing the weakest. 

It does not, however, appear, from any evidence we can 
discover, that human action is determined uniformly by 
the strongest motive. Thatis the doctrine of Edwards, in 
his famous treatise on the will,* but as far as there is any 


*The fortunes of this Treatise, in the world of morals and religion, have 
been quite as remarkable as the puzzle it has raised in the world of letters. 
The immediate object of the writer was gained, and the faith of God’s eternal 
government, assailed by a crazy scheme of liberty which brought in. open 
question the divine foreknowledge and the proper self-understanding of 
God in his plan, was effectually vindicated. So far the argument availed to 
serve the genuine purposes of religion. But, from that day to this, passing 
over to the side opposite, it has been turned more and more disastrously 
against the christian truth, and even against the first principles of moral 


48 NOT DETERMINED BY 


appearance of force in his argument, it consists in the 
inference drawn, or judgment passed, a/ier any act of 
choice, that the inducing motive must have ben the 
strongest because it prevailed. Whereas, appealing to his 
simple consciousness, he would have found that he had 
never a thought of the superior strength of the motive 
chosen, before the choice; and that, when he ascertained the 
fact of its superiority, it was only by an inference or specu- 
lative judgment drawn from the choice—just as some 
harvester, noting the heavy perspiration that drenches his 
body in the field, will judge from such a sign that he must 
be dissolving with heat; when the real sense of his body, 
wiser and truer than his logic, is that he is being cooled. 
And what, moreover, if it should happen that Edwards, 
in his inference, is only carrying over into the world of 
nunda judgment formed in the world of matter; subjecting 
human souls to the analogy of scale-beams, and conclud- 
ing that, since nature yields to the strongest force, the 
supernatural must do the same. Meantime, what is the 
consciousness testifying? Here is the whole question. 
There is no place here for a volume, or even for the 


obligation. Priestly was an implicit believer in the doctrine, holding it as the 
foundation principle of a scheme of necessity which could hardly be said to 
leave a real place for duty in the world. And now, in our own day, it hag 
descended to the level of the subterranean infidelity, and become a familiar 
and standing argument with almost every moral outcast, who has thought 
enough in him to know that he is annoyed by the distinctions of virtue. 
Having turned philosopher on just this point and shown that we are all goy- 
arned by the strongest motive, he asks, with an air of triumph, where, then, 
is the place for blame? What do we all but just what we are made to do? 
Could Edwards return to look on the uses now made of his argumert, nis 
saintly spirit might possibly be stirred with some doubts of its validity. 

Compare the able statement of this subject by Harris.—-(Primeval Man, 
100 Sec VI. 


THE STRONGEST? MOTIVE. 49 


amount of a syllogism. Find what the consciousness test: 
ifies and that, all tricks of argument apart, is the truth. 
Taking, then, this simpte issue, the verdict we are quite 
sure is against the doctrine of Edwards; viz., that, in all. 
wrong, or blamable action, we consciously take the weakest 
motive and most worthless; and, partly for that reason, 
blame our own folly and perversity. It may be that the 
good rejected stands superior only before our rational con- 
victions, while the enticement followed stirs more actively 
our lusts and passions Still we: know, and believe, and 
deeply feel, at the time, —we even shudder it may bein the 
choice, at the sénse of our own perversity—that we are 
choosing the worst and meanest thing, casting away the 
gold and grasping after the dirt. Probably a good many 
crude-minded persons, little capable of reporting the true 
verdict of their consciousness, would answer immediately, 
after any such act of choice, that they made it because the 
motive was strongest; for every most vulgar mind is so 
far under the great law of dynamics as to judge that 
whatever force prevails must be the strongest. Besides, 
how could he be a reasonable being if he chose the weak- 
est motive ; therefore it must be that he chose the strongest. 
So it stands, not as any report of consciousness, but simply 
as a must be of the logical understanding. Whereas, the 
real sin of the choice was exactly this and nothing else, 
that the wrong-doer followed after the weakest and worst, 
and did not act as a reasonable being should; and that is 
what his consciousness, if he could get far back enough 
into the sense of the moment, would report. Nor does 
it vary at all the conclusion that a wrong-doer chooses 
the weakest motive, to imagine, with many loose-minded 
teachers, that the right is only postponed, and the wrong 


50 THE WIL] NOT UNDER 


chosen for the moment, with a view to secure the double 


benefit, both of the right and the wrong; for the real ques- 
tion, at the time, is, in every such case, whether it is wisest, 
best, and every way most advantageous, to make the 
delay and try for the double benefit; and no man ever yet 
believed that it was. Never. was ae a case of wrong 
or sinful choice, in which the agent believed that he was 


really choosing the strongest, or weightiest and most valu- _ 


able motive.* 
So far, then, is man from being any proper item of 


* A certain class of theologians may, perhaps, imagine that such a view 
of choice takes away the ground of the Divine foreknowledge. How can 
God foreknow what choices men may form, when, for aught that ap- 
pears, they as often choose against the strongest motive as with it? 
He cculd not foreknow any thing, we answer, under such conditions, if he 
were obliged to find out future things, as the astronomers make out almanacs, 
by computation. But he is a being, not who computes, but who, by the 
eternal necessity even of his nature, intuits every thing. His foreknowledge 
does not depend on his will, or the adjustment of motives to make us will 
thus or thus, but he foreknows every thing first conditionally, in the world 
of possibility, before he creates, or determines any thing to be, in the world 
of fact. Otherwise, all his purposes would be grounded in ignorance, not in 
wisilom, and his knowledge would consist in following after his will, to learn 
what his will has blindly determined. This is not the scripture doctrine, 
which grounds all the purposes of God in his wisdom; thatis, in what he per: 
ceives by his eternal intuitive foreknowledge of what is contained in all posst- 
ble systems aid combinations before creation—“ whom he did foreknow, them 
he also did predestinate ’—“ elect, according to the foreknowledge of God.” 
If, then, God foreknows, or intuitively knows, all that is in the possible sys. 
tem and the possible man, without calculation, he can have little difficulty, 
~ afler that, in foreknowing the actual man, who is nuthing but the possible 
in the world of possibles, set on foot and become actual in the world of ac- 
tuals. So far, therefore, as the doctrine of Edwards was contrived to sup- 
port the certainty of God’s foreknowledge, and lay a basis for the systematic 
yavernment of the world and the universal sovereignty of God's purposes, 
it appears to be quite unnecessary. 


CAUSE AND EFFKCT. Bl 


nature. He is under no law of cause and effect in his 
choices. He stands out clear and sovereign as a being 
supernatural, and his definition is that he is an original 
power, acting, not in the line of causality, but from him- 
self. He is not independent of nature in the sense of 
being separated from it in his action, but he is in it, envi- 
roned by it, acting through it, partially sovereign over it, 
always sovereign as regards his self-determination, and 
only not completely sovereign as regards executing all 
that he wills in it. In certain parts or departments of the 
soul itself, such as memory, appetite, passion, attention, 
Imagination, association, disposition, the will-power in him 
is held in contact, so to speak, with conditions and quali- 
ties that are dominated partly by laws of cause and effect; 
for these faculties are partly governed by their own Lae 
and partly submitted to his governing will by their own 
laws; so that when he will exercise any control over them, 
or turn them about to serve his purpose, he can-do it, in a 

ualified sense and degree, by operating through their 
laws. As far as they are concerned, he is pure nature, 
and he is only a power superior to cause and effect at the 
particular point of volition where his liberty culminates, 
and where the administration he is to maintain over his 
whole rature centers. 

It is also a part of the same general view that, as all 
functions of the soul but the will are a nature, and are 
only qualifiedly sub*ected to the will by their laws, the will, 
without ever being restricted in its self-determination, will 
often be restricted, as regards executive force to perform 
what it wills. In this matter of executive force or capaci- 
ty, we are under physiological and cerebral limitations; 
limitations of association, want, condition; limitations of 


52, EXECUTIVE FORCE 


miseducated thought, perverted sensibility, prejudice, su- 
perstition, a second nature of evil habit and passion; by 
which, plainly enough, our capacity of doing or becoming 


is greatly reduced. This, in fact, is the grand, all-condi- — 


tioning truth of Christianity itself; viz., that man has no 
ability, in himself and by merely acting in himself, to 
become right and perfect; and that, hence, without some 
extension to him from without and above, some approach 
and ministration that is supernatural, he can never become 
what his own ideals require. And therefore it is the more 
remarkable that so many are ready, ‘in all ages, to take up 
the notion, and are even doing it now, as a fresh discovery, 
that these stringent limitations on our capacity take away 


the liberty of our will. As if the question of executive 


force, the ability to make or become, had any thing to do 
with our self-determining liberty! At the poiut of the 
will itself we may still be as free, as truly original and 
self-active, as if we could do or execute all that we would; 
otherwise, freedom would be impossible, except on the 
cundition of being omnipotent; and even then, as in due 
time we shall see, would be environed by many insuper- 
able necessities. As long ago as when Paul found it pres- 
ent with him to will, but could not find how to perform, 
this distinction between volitional self-determination and ex- 
ecutive capacity began to be recognized, and has been re- 
eognized and stated, in every subsequent age, till now. No 
one is held, even for a moment, to a bad and wrong self- 
determination, simply because he has not the executive 
force to will himself into an angel, or because he can not 
become, unhelped, and at once, all that he would He is 
therefore still a fair subject of blame; partly because he 
has narrowed his capacities, or possibilities, of doing or be 


a 


UNDER LIMITATIONS. | 59 


coming, by his former sin, and partly because he cousci- 
ously does not will the right and struggle after God now; 
which he is under perfect obligation to lo, because the terms 
of duty are absolute or unconditional; and, if possible, still 
more perfect because he has helps of grace and favor put 
in his reach, to be laid hold of, which, if he accepts them, 
will infallibly medicate the disabilities he is under, 

That mankind, as being under sin, are under limitations 
of executive ability, unable to do and become all that is re- 
quired of them by their highest ideals of thought, is then 
no new doctrine. Chfistianity is based in the fact of such a 
disability, and affirms it constantly as a fact that creates no 
infringement of responsibility and personal liberty at all, 
as regards the particular sphere of the will itself And 

thereforé it will not be expected of any Christian that he 
will be greatly impressed by what are sometimes offered 
how as original and peremptory decisions against human 
liberty, grounded in the fact that man is not omnipotent— 
uot able to do or become, what he is able to think, 
Thus we have the following, offered as a final disposal of | 
the question of liberty, by a very brilliant, entertaining, 
and often very acute writer:— Do you want an image of 
the human will, or the self-determining principle, ‘as com- 
pared with its prearranged and impossible restrictions ? 
A drop of water imprisoned in a crystal; you may see 
such a one in any mineralogical collection. One little par. 
ficle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe, * * 
The chief planes of its inclosing solid are of course organ- 
ization, education, condition, Organization may reduce 
the will to nothing, as in some idiots; and, from this 
zero, the scale mounts upward, by slight gradations, 


Education is only second to nature. Imagine all the 


ore 


54 SELF—DETERMINATION STILL 


infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change 
places! Condition does less, but ‘“ Give me neither pov: 
erty nor riches” was the prayer of Agur, and with good 
reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, 
it is in getting out of the region of pure abstractions, and 
taking these every-day forces into account.” * 

It may have been a fault of the former times that, in 
judgments of human character and conduct, no sufficient _ 
allowance was made for these ‘every-day forces” and 
others which might be named, if so, let the mistake be 
corrected; but to imagine that the freedom, or self-deter- 
mining liberty of the human will 1s to be settled by any 
such external references, even starts the suspicion that the 
idea itself of the will has not yet arrived. So when the 
doctrine is located as being a something in ‘the region of 
pure abstractions,” because it is not found by some scalpel 
inspection, or out-door hunt in the social conditions of life. 
What can be further off from all abstractions than the im- 
mediate, living, central, all-dominating consciousness of our 
own self-activity? Is consciousness an abstraction? Is 
any thing further off from abstractions, or more impossible 
to be classed with them? On the contrary, the very con- 
ceit here allowed, that a great question of consciousness 
may be settled by external processes of deduction, and by 
generalizations that do not once touch the fact, is only an 
attempt to make an abstraction of it. And yet, after it is 
done and seems to be finally disposed of in that manner, 
after the discovery is fully made out that our self-determin- 
ing will is only “a drop of water imprisoned in a crystal, 
one little particle.in the crystalline prism of the solid 
universe,” who is there, not excepting the just now very 


~~ 


* Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1858, p. 464. 


A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 55 


much humbled discoverer himself, who does not know, 
every day of his life, and does not show, a thousand times 
a day, that he has the sense in him of something diflerent. 
Kiven if he does no more than humorously dub himself 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, it will be sufficiently plair 
that his autocracy is a much more considerable figure with 
him than a drop of water in a crystal, He most evidently 
imagines some presiding and determining mind at the 
Table, that is much more of a reality and much less of an 
abstraction. | 

And so it will be found universally that, however 
strongly drawn the supposed disadvantages and hin- 
drances to virtue may be, there is, in every mind, a large 
and positive consciousness of being master of its own 
choices and responsible for them. A translation from 
Boston to Timbuctoo will not anywise alter the fact. 
There was never a man, however niseducated, or sup- 
pressed by his necessities, or corrupted by bad associations, 
or misled by base examples, who had not still his moral 
convictions, and did not blame himself in wrongs commit- 
ted. So firm, and full, and indestructible is this inborn, 
moral autocracy of the soul, that, as certainly in Timbuc- 
too as in Boston, it takes upon itself the sentence of wrong, - 
and no matter what inducements there may have been, no 
matter. how brutalized the practices in which it had been 
trained, recognizes still the sovereignty of right, and 
blames itself in every known deviation from it. Mis 
judgment of what particular things are necessary to fulfill 
the great idea of right may be coarse, and, as we should 
say, mistaken; but he acknowledges, in the deepest con- 
victions of his nature, that nothing done against the 
eternal, necessary law of right can be justified. The fact 


56 --s-HENCGE ALL GREATNESS 


that his wild nature is so nearly untamable to right, or 
that being or becoming the perfect good he thinks, is so 
tar off from his capacity, so nearly impossible under his 
executive limitations, is really nothing. Still he must, 
and does, condemn the bad liberty allowed in every 
conscious wrong. , | 

Self-determination, therefore, as respects the mere will 
as a power of volition, 1s essentially indestructible. And 
it is this gift of power, this originative liberty, consti 
tuting, as it does, the central attribute of all personality, 
that gives us impressions of what is personal in character, 
so different from those which we derive from any thing 
‘natural. Hence, for example, it is that we look on the 
nobler demonstrations of character in man, with a feeling 
so different from any that can be connected with mere 
cause and effect. In every friend we distinguish some- 
thing more than a distillation of natural causes; a free, 
faithful soul, that, having a power to betray, stays fast m 
the integrity of love and sacrifice. We rejoice in heroie 
souls, and in every hero we discover a majestic spirit, how 
far transcending the merely instinctive and necessary 
actings of animal and vegetable life. He stands out in 
the flood of the world’s causes, strong in his resolve, not 
knowing, in a just fight, how to yield, but protesting, 
with Coriolanus,— 

Let the Volsces — 
Plow Rome and harrow Italy, Dll never 
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but siand, 


As if a man were author of himself, 
And knew no other kin. 


Hence the honor we so profusely yield to the martyrs, - 
who are God’s heroes; able, as in freedom, to yield their 


IN CHARACTER | 57 


flesh up in the fires of testimony, and sing themselves 
away in the smoke of their consuming bodies. Were 
they a part only of nature, and held to this by the law 
of cause and effect in nature, we should have as much 
reason to honor their christian fortitud>, as we have to 
honor the combustion of a fire; even that which kindled 
their faggots :—as much and not more. ; 
Such is the sense we have of all great character in men. 
We look upon them, not as wheels that are turned by 
natural causes, yielding their natural effects, as the flour 
is yielded by a mill, but what we call their character is 
the majestic proprium of their personality, that which 
they yield as the fruit of their glorious self-hood and im- 
mortal liberty. What, otherwise, can those triumphal 
arches mean, arranged for the father of his country, now 
on his way to be inaugurated as its First Magistrate? 
what those processions of women, strewing the way with 
flowers? what the thundering shouts of men, seconding 
their voices by the boom of cannon posted on every hill? 
Why this thrill of emotion just now running electrically 
through so many millions of hearts toward this single 
man? It is the reverence they feel, and can not fitly ex- 
press, to personal greatness and heroic merit in a great 
cause. Were our Washington conceived in that course of 
good and great action, by which he became the deliverer 
of his country, to be the mere distillation of natural causes, 
who of us would allow himself to be thrilled with any such 
sentiments of reverence and personal homage? . Itis no | 
mere wheel, no link in a chain, that stirs our blood in this 
manner; but it is a man, the sense we have of a man, rising 
out of the level of things, great above all things, great as be- 
ing himself. Here it is, in demonstrations like these, that 


58ee WE OURSELVES, THEN 


we ineet the spontaneous verdict of mankind, apart from all 
theories, and quibbles, and sophistries of argument, testify: 
ing that man is a creature out of mere nature—a free cause 


in himself—great, therefore, in the majesty of great virtues” 


and heroic acts. 

The same is ‘true, as we may safely assume, in regard 
to all the other orders and realms of spiritual existence 5 
to angels good and bad, seraphim, principalities, and 
powers in heavenly places. They are all supernatural, 
and it is in them, as belonging to this higher class of ex- 
istences, that God beholds the final causes, the uses, and 
the grand systematizing ideas of his universal plan. Na- 
ture, as comprehending the domain of cause and effect, 1s 
only the platform on which he establishes his kingdom as 
a kingdom of minds, or persons, every one of whom has 
power to act upon it, and, to some extent, oreater or less, 
to be sovereign over it. So that, after all which has been 
done by the sensuous littleness, the shallow pride, and 
the idolatry of science, to make a total universe, or even & 
God, of nature, still it is nothing but the carpet op which 
we children have our play, and which we may only use 
according to its design, or may cut, and burn, and tear at 
will. The true system of God centers still in us, and not 
in it; in our management, onr final glory and completeness 
of being as persons, not in the set figures of the carpet 
we so eagerly admire and call it science to ravel. 


Finding, now, in this manner, that we ourselves are 
supernatural creatures, and that the supernatural, instead 
of being some distant, ghostly affair, 1s familiar to us as 
our own most familiar action; also, that nature, as a realm 
of cause and effect, is made to be acted on from without 


ARE SUPERNATURAL AGENTS 59 


by us and all moral beings—thus to be the environment of 
our life, the instrument of our activity, the medium of 
our right or wrong doing toward each other, and so the 
school of our trial—a further question rises; viz., what 
shall we think of God’s relations to nature? If it be 
nothing incredible that we should act on the chain of 
cause and effect in nature, is it more incredible that God 
should thus act? Strange as it may scem, this is the 
grand offense of supernaturalism, the supposing that God 
can act on nature from without; on the chain of cause and 
effect in nature from without the chain of connection, by 
which natural consequences are propagated—exactly that 
which we ourselves are doing as the most familiar thing in 
our lives!* It involves, too, as we can seé at a glance, and 
shall hereafter show more fully, no disruption, by us, of 
the laws of nature, but only a new combination of its 
elements and forces, and need not any more involve such 
a disruption by Him. Nor can any one show that a mira- 
cle of Christ, the raising, for example, of Lazarus, in- 
volves any thing more than that nature is prepared to be 
acted on by a divine power, just as it is to be acted on by 
a human, in the making of gunpowder, or the making and 
charging of a fire-arm. For, though there seems to be an 
immense difference in the grade of the results accom: 
plished, it is only a difference which ought to appear, re- 
garding the grade of the two agents by whom they are 
wrought. How different the power of two men, creatures 
though they be of the same order; a Newton, for exam- 
ple, a Watt, a Fulton; and some wild Patagonian or stunted 
Hsquimaux. So, if there be angels, seraphim, thrones, 
dominions, all in ascending scales of endowment above 
me another, they will, of course, have powers supernaw- 


—— 


* Note, page 63. 


60 SO ALSO IS GOD, 


ral, or capacities to act on the lines of causes in nature, 
that correspond with their natural quantity and degree. 
What wonder, then, is it, in the case of Jesus Christ, that 
he reveals a power over nature, appropriate to the scale of 
his being and the inherent supremacy of his divine 
person. 

And yet, it will not do, our philosopners tell us, to ad- 
mit any such thing a8 a miracle, or that any thing does, 
or can, take place by a divine power, which nature itself 
does not bring to pass! God, in other words, can not be 
- supposed to act on the line of cause and effect in nature, 
for nature is the universe, and the law of universal order 
makes a perfect system. Hence a great many of our nat- 
uralists, who admit the existence of God, and do not mean 
to identify his substance with nature, and call him the 
Creator, and honor him, at least in words, as the Governor 
of all things, do yet insist that it must be unphilosophical 
to suppose any present action of God, save what is acted 
in and through the preordained system of nature. The 
author of the Vestiges of Creation, for example, (p. 118,) 
looks on cause and effect as being the eternal will of God, 
and nature as the all-comprehensive order of his Provi- 
dence, beside which, or apart from which, he does, and 
can be supposed to do, nothing. A great many who call 
themselves Christian believers, really hold the same thing, 
and can suffer nothing different. Nature, to such, in- 
cludes man. God and nature, then, are the all of exist- 
ence, and there is no acting of God upon nature; for that 
' would be supernaturalism. He may be the originative 
source of nature; he may even be the immediate, all-im- 
pelling will, of which cause and effect are the symptoms; 


that is he may have made, and may actuate the machine, - 


OTHERWISE A NULLITY, - 6) 


in that fated, foredoomed way which cause and effect de- 
scribes, but he must not act upon the machine-system outs 
side of the foredoomed way; if he does, he will disturb 
the immutable laws! In fact, he has no liberty of doing 
any thing, but just to keep agoing the everlasting trundle 
of the machine. He can not even act upon his works, 
save aS giving and maintaining the natural law of his 
works; which law is a limit upon Him, as truly as a bond 
of order upon them. He is incrusted and shut in by his 
own ordinances. Nature is the god above God, and he 
can not cross her confines. His ends are all in nature: 
for, outside of nature, and beyond, there is nothing but 
Himself. He is only a great mechanic, who has made a 
great machine for the sake of the machine, having his 
work all done long ages ago. Moral government is out 
of the question—there is no government but the predes- 
tined rolling of the machine. If a man sins, the sin is 
only the play of cause and effect; that is, of the machine. 
If he repents, the same is true—sin, repentance, love, 
hope, joy, are all developments of cause and effect; that 
is, of the machine. If a-soul gives itself to God in love, 
the love is but a grinding-out of some wheel he has set 
turning, or it may be turns,in the scheme of nature. If I 
look up to him and call him Father, he can only pity the 
conceit of my filial feeling, knowing that it is attributable 
to nothing but the run of mere necessary cause and effect 
in me, and is no more, in fact, from me, than the rising of 
a mist or cloud is from some buoyant freedom in its par- 
ticles. If I look up to him for help and deliverance, He 
can only hand me over to cause and effect, of which I 
am a link myself, and bid me stay in my place to be 
what I am made to be. ete can touch me by no 


622 A. BEING ENTOMBED 


extension of sympathy, and I must even break through 
nature (as He Himself can not,) to obtain a look of recog- 
nition. | | 

How miserable a desert is existence, both to Him 
and to us, under such conditions—to Him, because of 
his character; to us, because of our wants. To be 
thus entombed in his works, to have no scope for his 
virtues, no field for ‘his perfections, no ends to seek, 
1.0 liberty to act, save in the mechanical way of mere 
causality—what could more effectually turn his goodness 
into a well-spring of baffled desires and defeated sympa- 
- thies, and make His kingship itself a burden of sorrow. 
Meantime the supposition is, to us, a mockery, against 
which all our deepest wants and highest personal affini- 
ties are raised up, as it were, in mutinous protest. If 
there is nothing but God and nature, and God Himself 
has no relations to nature, save just to fill it and keep 
it on its way, then, being ourselves a part of nature, we 
are only a link, each one, in a chain let down into a well, 
where nothing else can ever touch us but the next link 
above! O, it is horrible! Our soul freezes at the 
thought! We want, we must have, something better—a 
social footing, a personal, and free, and flexible, and 
conscious relation with our God; that he should cross 
over to us, or bring us over the dark Styx of nature 
uuto Himself, to love Him, to obtain His recognition, 
to receive His manifestation, to walk in His guidance, 
and be raised to that higher footing of social under- 
standing and spiritual concourse with Him, where our 
inborn affinities find their center and rest. And what 
we earnestly want, we know that we shall assuredly 
find. The prophecy is in us, and whether we call 


IN HIS WORKS. 63 


ourselves prophets or not, we shall certainly go on to 
publish it. 1tis the inevitable, first fact. of natural convie- 
tion with us. Do we not know, each one, that he is 
more than a thing or a wheel, and, being consciously 
a man, a spirit, a creature supernatural, will he hesitate 
to claim a place with such, and claim for such a place ? 


* It has been objected that the argument of my treatise is nugatory, 
because it does not meet the particular question of creatorship, or the 
supernatural origin of the world. And it does not show, as I readily 
grant, that the atomic forces of the world have not themselves organ- 
ized and kept in progressive development the general system of nature. 
But it certainly does make room for the coexistence of God with 
nature from eternity, in a relation side by side with it, of supernatural 
agency and control. There is nothing incompatible, in other words, 
between the two ideas, God in supreme working and nature in com- 
plete orderly subjection to his will. Then, having reached this point, 
and found that all the difficulties in the way of a supernatural suprem- 
acy over nature are already surmounted, we have scarcely a stage 
farther to go, when we assume that the said supernatural supremacy 
itself supposes the fact of a supernatural creatorship, for in that ony 
could it have begun. 

It is very true that the argument instituted does not join issue with 
the pretended self-development of nature, as it is now suggested and 
taught by a certain school of science. That would have carried me 
off into a different field, where all that I am here proposing to gain 
would be virtually renounced. To require it was to require a wholly 
different treatise. 


CHAPTER III. 


NATURE 1S NUT THE SYSTEM OF GOD.—THINGS AND POW 
ERS, HOW RELATED. 


Gop is expressed but not measured by his works; 
least of all, by the substances and laws included under the 
general term, nature. . And yet, how liable are we, over- 
powered, as we often are, and oppressed by the magni- 
tudes of nature, to suffer the impression that there can be 
nothing separate and superior, beyond nature. ‘The 
eager mind of science, for example, sallying forth on 
excursions of thought into the vast abysses of worlds, dis- 
covering tracks of light that must have been shooting - 
downward and away from their sources, even for millions 
of ages, to have now arrived at their mark; and then dis- 
covering also that, by such a reach of computation, it 
has not penetrated to the center, but only reached the 
margin or outmost shore of the vast fire-ocean, whose 
particles are astronomic worlds, falls back spent, and, 
having, as it were, no spring left for another trial, or the 
endeavor of a stronger flight, surrenders, overmastered 
and helpless, crushed into silence. At such an hour, it 
is any thing but a wonder that nature is taken for the all, 
the veritable system of God; beyond which, or collateral 
with which, there is nothing. For so long a time is 
science imposed upon by nature, not instructed by it; as 
if there could be-nothing greater than distance, measure, 
quantity, and show, nothing higher than the formal plati- 
tude of things. But the healthy, living mind will, sooner 
or later, recover itself. It will spring up out of this pros- 
tration before nature, to imagine other things, which eye 


NATURAL MAGNITUDES OPPRESSIVE. 65 


hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor science computed. Tt 
will discover fires, even in itself, that flame’above the 
stars. It will break over and through the narrow con- 
fines of stellar organization, to conceive a spiritual Kos- 
mos, or divine system, which contains, and uses, and is 
only shadowed in the faintest manner by, the prodigious 
trivialities of external substance. Indeed, I think all 
minds unsophisticated by science, or not disempowered 
by external magnitudes, will conceive God as a being 
‘whose fundamental plan, whose purpose, end, and system 
are nowise measured by that which lies in dimension, 
even though the dimensions be measureless. They will 
say with Zophar still_—‘‘The measure thereof is longer 
than the earth and broader than the sea.” And the real, 
proper universe of God, that which is to God the final 
cause of all things, will be to them a realm so far trans- 
cending the outward immensity, both in quantity and 
kind, that this latter will be scarcely more than some 
outer gate of approach, or eyelet of observation. 

What I propose, then, in the present chapter, coinci- 
dently with the strain of remark here indulged, is to 
undertake a negative, showing (what, in fact, is decisive 
upon the whole question,) that the surrender of so many 
minds to nature and her magnitudes is premature and 
weak; that nature plainly is not, and can not be, the proper 
and complete system of God; or, if we speak no more of 
(yod, of the universe. 


It would seem that any really thoughtful person, when 
about to surrender himself to nature, in the manner just 
described, must be detained by a simple glance at the 


manifest yearning of the human race, in all ages and ~ 


6* 


66 HUMAN NATURE CRAVES 


nations, for something supernatural. Their affinity for 
objects supernatural is far more evident, as a matter of 
history, than for objects scientific and natural. Instead of 
reducing their gods and religions to the terms of nature, 
they have peopled nature with gods, and turned even their 
agriculture into a concert, or concurrence, with the un 
seen powers and their ministries. Witness, in this view, 
the immense array of mythologic and formally unrational 
religions, extinct or still existing, that have been accepted 
by the populations of the world. Notice in particular 
also, that, when the keen dialectics of the polished Greeks 
and Romans had cut away the foundations of their re- 
ligions, instead of lapsing into the cold no-religion of the 
Sophists, the cultivated mind of their scholars and 
philosophers passed straight on by the dialectics, to lay 
hold of Christianity ; and Christianity, more rational but 
in no degree less supernatural than the religions over- 
turned, was accepted as the common faith. And what is 
not less remarkable, Christianity itself, as if not supernat- 
ural enough, was corrupted by the addition of still new 
wonders pertaining to the virgin, the priesthood, the sac- 
raments, and even the bones of the saints; indicated all, 
and some of them (such as that Mary is the Mother of 
God,) generated even, by dialectic processes. And so it 
ever has been. Men can as well subsist in a vacuum, or 
on a mere metallic earth, attended by no vegetable or ani- 
mal products, as they can stay content with mere cause 
and effect, and the endless cycle of nature. They may 
drive themselves into it, for the moment, by their specula- 
tions; but the desert is too dry, and the air too thin—they 
can not stay. Accordingly, we find that just now, when 
the propensities to mere naturalism are so manifold and 


A SUPERNATURAL RELIGION. 67 


eager, they are yet instigated in their eagerness itself by 
an inipulse that scorns all the boundaries of mere knowl 
edye and reason; that is, by an appetite for things of faith, 
or a hope of yet fresher miracles and greater mysteries—- 
gazing after the Boreal crown of Fourier, and the thaw- 
ing out of-the poles under the heat of so great felicity te 
come; or watching at the gate of some third heaven to be 
opened by the magnetic passes, or the solemn incantations 
of the magic circles; expecting an irruption of demons, 
in the name of science, more fantastic than even that 
which plagued the world in the days of Christ, and which 
so many critics, in the name also of science, were just 
now laboring most intently to weed out of the gospel his- 
tory. ‘True, the magnetic revelations are said to be in 
the way of nature; no matter for that, if only they are 
wonderful enough; all the better, indeed, if they give us 
things supernatural to enjoy and live in, without the 
name. Only we must have mysteries, and believe, and 
take wings, and fly clear of the dull level of comprehen- 
sible cause and substance, somehow. Such is man, such 
are we all. 

We are like the poet Shelley, who, after he had sunk 
into blank atheism, as regards religion, could not stay con- 
tent, but began forthwith to people his brain and the 
world with griffins, and gorgons, and animated rings, and 
tery serpents, and spirits of water and wind, and became, 
in fact, the most mythologic of all modern poets; only 
that he made his mythologie machinery himself, out of 
the delirious shapes exhaled from the deep atheistic hunger 
of his soul. And the new Mormon faith, or fanaticisra, 
that strangest phenomenon of our times—what is it, in 
fact, but a breaking loose by the human soul, pressed 


68 SHELLEY’S MYTHOLOGY. 


down by ignorance and unbelief together, to find some 
element of miracle and mystery, in which it may range 
and feed its insatiable appetite; a raw and truculent im- 


posture of supernaturalism, dug ap out of the earth but — 


yesterday, which, just because it is not under reason 
and is held by no stays of opinion, kindles the fires 
of the soul’s eternity to a pitch of fiérceness and a 
really devastating energy. And were the existing faith 
of powers unseen and worlds abcve the range of science 
blotted out, leaving us shut down under atheism, or mere 
nature, and gasping in the dull vacuum it makes, I verily 
believe that we should instantly begin to burst up all into 
Mormonism, or some other newly invented faith, no better 
authenticated. 

Into this same gasping state, in fact, we are thrown by 
our new school of naturalistic literature, and we can easily 
distinguish, in the conscious discontent that nullifies 


both our pleasure and praise, the fact of some transcend- — 


ent, inborn affinity, by which we are linked to things 
above the range of mere nature. Who is a finer master 
of English than Mr. Kmerson? Who offers fresher 


thoughts, in shapes of beauty more fascinating? Intoxi- 


cated by his brilliant creations, the reader thinks, for the 
time, that he is getting inspired. And yet, when he has 
closed the essay or the volume, he is surprised to find— 
who has ever failed to notice it?—that he is disabled 
instead, disempowered, reduced in tone. He has no great 
thought or purpose in him; and the force or capacity for 
it seems to be gone. Surely, it 1s a wonderfully clear 
atmosphere that he is in, and yet it is somehow mephitic] 
How could it be otherwise? As it is a first principle ‘that 
water will not rise above its own level, what better reason 


EMERSON’S BRAMINISM. 69 


is tdere to expect that a creed which disowns duty and 
turns achievernent into a conceit of destiny, will bring to 
man those great thoughts, and breathe upon him in those 
gales of impulse, which are necessary to the empowered 
state, whether of thought or of action? Grazing in the 
field of nature is not enough for a being whose deepest 
affinities lay hold of the supernatural, and reach after 
God. Airy and beautiful the field may be, shown by so 
great a master; full of goodly prospects and fascinating 
images; but, withcut a living God, and objects of faith, 
and terms of duty, it is a pasture only—nothing more. 
Hence the unreadiness, the almost aching incapacity felt 
to undertake any thing or become any thing; by one who 
has taken lessons at this school. Nature is the all, and 
nature will do every thing, whether we will or no. Call 
it duty, greatness, heroism, still it is hers, and she will 
have more of it when she pleases. If, then, nature does 
not set him on also, and do all in him, there is an end; 
what can he expect to do in the name of duty, faith, 
sacrifice, and high resolve, when nature is not in the plan? 
What better, indeed, is- there left him, or more efficient, 
than just to think beautiful thoughts, if he can, and sur- 
render himself to the luxury of watching the play of his 
own reflective egoism? Given Brama for a god and 
a religion, what is left us more certainly than that we our. 
selves become Asiatics? Such kind of influence would 
turn the race to pismires, if only we could stay content in 
it, as happily we can not; for, if we chance to find our 
pleasure in it for an hour, a doom as strong as eternity in 
us compels us finally to spurn it, as a brilliant inanity. 

But we are going further with our point than we 
intended. Admitting the universal tendency of the race, 


70 THE HOST IN OPPOSITION 


in past ages, to a faith in things supernatural, it may be 
imagined by some that, as we advance in calture, we 
must finally reach a stage, where reason will enforce a 
different demand; they may even return upon us the 
list we gave, in our introductory chapter, of the parties 
now conspiring the overthrow of a supernatural faith, 
requiring us to accept them as proofs that the more 
advanced stage of culture is now about to be reached. In 
that case, it is enough to answer that the naturalizing 
habit of our times is clearly no indication of any such 
new stage of advancement, but only a phase of social tend- 
ency once before displayed in the negative and destruct- 


ive era of the Greek and Roman religions; also that the’ 


grand conspiracy, exhibited in our own time, signifies 
much less than it would, if, after all, there were any real 
agreement among the parties. ‘Thus it will be found that, 
while they seem to agree in the assumption that nature 
includes every thing, and also to show by their imposing 
air of concert that in this way the world must needs grav- 
itate, there is yet, if we scan them more carefully, no such 
agreement as indicates any solid merit in their opinion, or 
even such as may properly entitle them to respect. 

Thus we find, first of all, a threefold distribution 
among them that sets them in as many schools, or tiers, 
between which there is almost nothing in common; one 
section or school maintaining that nature is God, another 
that it is originally the work of God, and a third that 
there is no God. If nature itself is God, then plainly 


God is not the Creator of nature by his own sovereign 


act; and if there is no God, then he is neither nature nor 
its Creator. Their agreement, therefore, includes noth- 
ing but a point of denial respecting the supernatural, 


ALSO CONTRADICT EACH OTHER. ei 


maintained for wholly opposite and contradictory reasons, 
So, as regards religion itself; to some it is a natural effet 
or growth in souls, and in that view a fact that evinces 
the real sublimity of nature; while to others it is itself « 
matter only of contempt, a creation of priestly artifice, or 
an excrescence of blind superstition. One, again, believes 
in. the personality, responsibility, and immortality of souls, 
finding a moral government in nature, and even what he 
calls a gospel; another, that man is a mere link in the 
chain of causalities, like the insects, responsibility a 
fiction, eternity a fond illusion; and still another that, 
being a mere link in the chain of causalities, he will yet 
forever be, and be happy in the consciousness that he is, 
The contrarieties, in short, are endless, and accordingly 
the weight of their apparent concert, when set against the 
general vote and appetite of the race for something super- 
natural, is wholly insignificant. If it be a token of 
advancing culture, it certainly is-not any token that a 
wiser age of reason or scientific understanding is yet 
reached; and the grand major vote of the race, for a 
supernatural faith, is nowise weakened by it. Still itis a 
fact, the universal fact of history, that man is a creature 
of faith, and can not rest in mere nature and natural caus- 
ality. Nothing will content him in the faith that nature 
is the all, or universal system of being. 


But the indications we discover within the realm of 
nature, or of cause and effect, are more striking even 
than those which we discover in the demonstrations of our 
own history. We have spoken of a system supernatural, 
superior to the system of nature, and subordinating 
always the latter to itself; understanding, however, that 


12 NATURE ITSELF OFFERS TYPES 


both together, in the truest and most proper sense, consti 
tute the real universal system of God. Now, as if te 
show us the possibility, and familiarize to us the fact of a 
subordination thus of one system and its laws to the uses 
and superior behests of another, we have, in the domain 
of nature herself, two grand systems of chemistry, or chem- 
ical force and action; one of which comes down upon the 
other, always from without, to dominate over it, decompos- 
ing substances which the other has composed, producing 
substances which the other could not. We speak here, it 
will be understood, of what is called inorganic chemistry, 
and vital chemistry, the chemistry of matter out of life or 
below it, and of that which is in it and by it. The lives 
that construct and organize the bodies they inhabit, are 
the highest forms of nature,.and are set in nature as types 
of a yet higher order of existence; viz., spirit, or free 
intelligence. They are immaterial, having neither weight 
nor dimensions of their own; and what is yet closer to 
mind, they act by no dynamic force, or impulsion, but 
from iyeaeatre coming down upon matter, as architects 
and chemists, to do their own will, as it were, upon the 
yaw matter and the dead chemistry of the world. We 
say not that they have in truth a will; they only have a 
certain plastic instinct, by which their fiers: chemis- 
try is actuated, and their architectural forms are supplied. 
We have thus a world immaterial within the boundaries 
of cause and effect; for the plastic instinct has causes of 
action in itself, and acts under a necessity as absolute as 
the inorganic forces. It belongs to nature, and not to the 
supernatural, because it is really in the chain of cause and 
effect, and is only a quost power. ‘The manner of work- 
ing, in these plastic chemistries, no science can dis- 


OF SUPERNATURAL AGENCY. 73 


cover and their products no science can imitate, 
Klements that are united by the laws of matter they will 
somehow resolve and separate, and elements which no 
laws of matter have ever united, they will bring into a mys- 
tic union, congenial to their own forms and uses. Thus, 
in place of the few distinct substances we should have, 
were the earth left to its pure metallic state, invaded by 
none of these myrmidons of life and the chemistries they 
bring with them, we have, provided for our use, immense 
varieties of substances which can not even be recount- 
ed—-woods, meats, bones, oils, wools, furs, grains, gums, 
spices, sweets, the fruits, the medicines, the grasses, the 
flowers, the odors—representatives all of so many lives, 
working in the clay, to produce what none but their exter- 
nal chemistry, entering into the clay in silent sovereignty, 
can summon it to yield. They are types in nature of the 
supernatural and its power to subordinate the laws of na- 
ture. ‘They come as God’s mute prophets, throwing down 
their rods upon the ground, as Moses did, that we may 
see their quickening and believe. We do believe that 
they contain a higher tier of chemical forces, superior to 
the lower tier of forces in the dead matter, and we are 
nowise shocked by the miracle, when we see them quicken 
the dead matter into life, and work it by their magic pow- 
er into substances, whose affinities were not inherent in 
the matter, but in the subtle chemists of vitality by 
whom they were fashioned. 

Nothing is better understood, for example, than that 
the three elements of the sugar principle have no discov- 
erable affinity by which they unite, and that no utmost 
art of science has ever been able, under the inorganic 


laws of matter, to unite them. They never do unite, save 
7 


74 AS DR. STRAUSS HIMSELF 


by the imposed chemistry of the sugar-making lives. 
And so it is of all vegetable and animal substances. ‘They 
exist because the system of vital chemistries is gifted 
with a qualified sovereignty over the system of imor- 
ganic chemistry. And it would seem as if it was the 
special design of God, in this triumph of tne lives over | 
the mineral order and its laws, to accustom us to the fact 
of a subordination of causes, and make us so familiar with 
it as to start no skepticism in us, when the sublimer facs 
of a supernatural agency in the affairs of the world is dis- 
covered or revealed. For, if the secret workings, the dis- 
solvings, distillations, absorptions, conversions, compost 
tions, continually going on about us and within, could be 
definitely shown, there is not any thing in all the mytholo- 
gies of the race, the doings of the gods, the tricks of fairies, 
the spells and transformations of the wizard powers, that 
can even approach the real wonders of fact here displayed. 
And yet we apprehend no breach or suspension of the 
laws of dead matter in the manifest subordination they 
suffer; on the contrary, we suppose that the dead mat- 
ter is thus subordinated, in a certain sense, through and 
by its own laws. As little reason have we to apprehend 
a breach upon the laws of nature in one of Christ’s mira- 
cles. Whatever yields to him, yields by its own laws, 
and not otherwise. So significant is the lesson given us 
by these myrmidons of life, that are filling the world with 
their activity, preparing it to their uses, and transforming 
it---otherwise a desert—into a frame of habitable order 
and beauty. | 

It is remarkable that even Dr. Strauss takes note of 
this same peculiarity observable in the works of nature, — 
“Tt is true,” he says, “that single facts and groups 


CAN DIDEY “4 DMIPTS* 75 


of tacts, with their conditions and processes of change, 
are not so circumscribed as to be unsusceptible of ex- 
terna] influence; for the action of one existence or 
kingdom in nature trenches on that of another; human 
freedom controls natural development, and material laws 
react on human freedom. Nevertheless, the totality ot 
finite things forms a vast circle, which, except that it owes 
its existence and laws to a superior power, suffers no 
intrusion from without. This conviction is so much a 
habit of thought with the modern world, that in actual 
life the belief in a supernatural manifestation, an immedi- 
ate divine agency, is at once attributed to ignorance or 
imposture.”* But, what if it should happen that above 
this “totality of things” there is a grand totality superior 
tothings? Wherein is it more incredible that this higher 
totality should exert a subordinating “‘external influence” 
on the whole of things, than that “one kingdom in nature 
trenches on another?” Why may not men, angels, God, 
subordinate and act upon the whole of what is properly 
called nature? and what are all the organific powers in 
nature doing but giving us a type of the truth, to make it 
familiar? And then how little avails the really low ap- 
peal from such a testimony to the current unbeliefs ard 
erudities of a superficial, coarse-minded, unthinkir.g 
world? It is not these which can convict such opm- 
ions of “ignorance or imposture.” Had this writer, 
on the contrary, observed that the subordination of one 
kingdom of nature and its laws to the action of anoth- 
er, covers all the difficulties of the question of miracles, 
he could have had some better title to the name of a 
philosopher. 


* Life of Jesug Vol. I, p. 71. 


76 GEOLOGY FURNISHES 


Meantime, while we are familiarized, in this manner, 
with the subordination of one system of laws and forces » 
to another; and prepared to admit the possibility, if we 
should not rather say forewarned of the actual existence 
of, another system above nature subordinating that; we 
also meet with arguments incorporated in the works of 
nature, that have a sturdier significance, rising up, as it 
were, to confront those coarse and truculent forms of skepti- 
eism on which, probably, the finer tokens just referred to 
would be jost. The atheist denies the existence of any 
being or power above nature; the pantheist does the 
same—only adding that nature is God, and entitled in 
some sense to the honor of religion. Now, to show the 
existence of a God supernatural, a God so far separated 
from nature and superior to it as to act on the chain of 
natural cause and effect from without the chain, the new 
science of geology comes forward, lays open her stone 
registers, and points us to the very times and places where 
the creative hand of God was inserted into the world, to 
people it with creatures of life. Thus it is an accepted or 
established fact in geology, that our planet was, at some 
remote period, in a molten or fluid state, by reason of the 
intense heat of its matter. HKmerging from this state by a 
gradual cooling process, there could of course be no seeds 
in it and no vestiges or germs of animal life. It is only — 
a vast cinder, in fact, just now alittle cooled on the sur- 
face; but still red hot within. And yet the registers show, 
beyond the possibility even of a doubt, that the cinder 
‘was, in due time and somehow, peopled with creatures of 
life. Whence came they or the germs of which they 
sprung? Out of the fire, or out of the cinde:? The fire 
would exterminate them al in a minute of time, and it 


ANOTHER KIND OF PROOF. V7 


will be difficult to imagine that the cinder, the nere me- 
tallic matter of the world, has any power to resolve itself, 
under its material laws, into reproductive and articulated 
forms of life. 

Again, these ancient registers of rock record the fact that, 
here and there, some vast fiery cataclysm broke loose, sub- 
merging and exterminating a great part of the living tribes 
of the world, after which came forth new races of occu- 
pants, more numerous and many of them higher and more 
perfect in their forms of organization. Whence came 
these? By what power ever discovered in nature were 
they invented, composed, articulated, and set breathing in 
the air and darting through the waters of the world? 

Finally man appears, last and most perfect of all the 
living forms; for, while so many successive orders and 
types of living creatures, vegetable and animal, show us 
their remains in the grand museum of the rocks, no ves- 
tige, or bone, or sign of man has ever yet been discovered 
there. Therefore here, again, the question returns, 
whence came the lordly occupant? Where was he con- 
ceived ? In what alembic of nature was he distilled? Py 
what conjunction of material causes was he raised up to 
look before and after, and be the investigator of all 
causes? 

Having now these facts of new production before us, 
we are obliged to admit some power out of nature and 
above it, which, by acting on the course of nature, started 
the new forms of organized life, or fashioned the germs 
out of which they sprung. To enter on a formal discussion 
of the theory, so ambitiously attempted by some of the 
naturalists, by which they are ascribed to the laws of 


mere nature or to natural development, would carry me 
H* ; 


78 | IT REFUTES 


farther into the polemics of geology and zodélogy than the 
limits of my present argument will suffer. J will only 
notice two or thrée of the principal points of this devel- 
opment theory, in which itis opposed by insurmountable 
facts.* 

First of all, 1t requires us to believe that the original 
germs of organic life may be and were developed out of 
matter by its inorganic forces. If so, why are no new 
germs developed now? and why have we no well-attested 
facts of the kind? Some few pretended facts we have, 
but they are too loosely made out to be entitled, for a mo- 
ment, to vur serious belief. Never yet has it been shown 
that any one germ of vegetable, or animal life, has been 
developed by the existing laws of nature, without some 
egg or germ previously supplied to start the process. Be- 
sides, 1t 18 inconceivable that there 1s a power in the metal- 
lic and earthy substances, or atoms, however cunningly 
assisted by electricity, to generate a seed or egg. If we 
ourselves can not even so much as cast a bullet without a 
mold, how can these dead atoms and blind electric cur- 
rents, without any matrix, or even governing type, weave 
the filaments and cast the living shape of an acorn, or any 
smallest seed? There can be no softer credulity than the 
skepticism which, to escape the need of a creative miracle, 
resorts to such a faith as this. 

But, supposing it possible, or credible, that certain germs 
of life may have been generated by the inorganic forces, 


* Whoever wishes to see this subject handled more scientifically and in a 


“most masterly manner, may consult the “ Essay on Classification * prefixed 
to the great work of Mr. Agassiz on Natural History, where the conceit 
that our an mal and vegetable races were started in their several eras by 
physical agencies, without a creative Intelligence, 1s exploded so as to be 
forever incapable of resuming even a pretense of reason. 


THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 79 


the development scheme has it still on hand to account 
for the existence of man. That he is thus composed in 
full size and maturity is impossible; he must be produced, 
if at all, in the state of infancy. Two suppositions, then, 
are possible, and only two; and we find the speculations 
of the school vibrating apparently between them. First, 
that there is a slow process of advance in order, through 
which the lowest forms of life gradually develop those 
which are higher and more perfect, and finally culminate 
in man. Or, secondly, that there is a power in all vital 
natures, by which, at distant but proper intervals, they 
suddenly produce some order of being higher than they, 
much as we often see in those examples of propagation 
which we denominate, most unphilosophically, lusus natu- 
re, and that so, as the last and highest lusus, if that were 
a scientific conception, man appears; being, in fact, the 
crown, or complete fulfillment, of that type of perfection 
which pertains to all, even the lowest, forms of life. In 
one view the progress is a regular gradation; in the other 
it is a progress by leaps or stages. 


k 
<< 
ta 


regards the former, it is a fatal objection that no 
such plastic, gradual movement of progress can be traced 
in the records of the geologic eras. All the orders, and 
genera, and species, maintain their immovable distinctions; 
and no trace can any where be discovered, whether there or 
in the now living races, of organic forms that are interme- 
diate and transitional. Tokens may be traced in the 
rocks of a transitional development in some given kind or 
species, as of the gradual process by which a frog is devel- 
oped; buat there is no trace of organized being midway 
between the frog and the horse, or of any insect or 
fish, on its way to becorae a frog. Besides, it is wholly 


80 IT REFUTES 


inconceivable that there should be i rerum natura any 
kind of creature that is midway, or transitional, betweer 
the oviparous and mammal orders. Still further, if man is 
the terminal of a slow and plastic movement, or advance, 
what has becorae of the forms next to man, just a little 
short of man? They are not among the living, nor 
among the dead. No trace of any such forms has ever 
been discovered by science. The monkey race have been 
set up as candidates for this honor, But, to say nothing 
of the degraded consciousness that can allow any creature 
of language, duty, and reason, to speak of his near affinity 
with these creatures, what one of them is there that could 
ever raise a human infant? And if none, there ought to 
be some intermediate race, yet closer to humanity, that 
can do it. Where is this intermediate race ? 

Just this, too, is the difficulty we encounter in the sec- 
ond form of the theory. There neither is nor can be any 
middle position between humanity and no humanity. If 
the child, for child there must be, is human, the mother 
and father must either be human or else mere animals, 
If they have not merely the power of using means tc 
ends, but the necessary ideas, truth, mght, cause, space, 
time, and also the faculty of language, that is of receiving 
the inner sense of symbols, which is the infallible test of 
intelligence, [¢ntws lego,| then they are human; otherwise 
they are animals. No matter, then, how high they may 
be in their order; their human child is a different form of 
being, with which, in one view, they have nothing in com- 
mon. And he is, by the supposition, born a child; the 
son of an animal, but yet a human child. And then the 
question rises, what animal is there, existing or conceiy: 
abie, what accident, or power in nature, that can nurse or 


—— 


THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 81 


shelter from death, that feeblest and most helpless of all 
creatures, a human infant? Neither do we tind, as a mat 
ter of fact, that the animal races advance in their nursing 
and protecting capacity, accordingly as they advance ir 
the scale of organization. ‘The nearest approach to that 
kind of tending and protective capacity, necessary to the 
raising of a human infant, any where discernible in the 
animal races, is found in the marsupial animals; which are 
yet far inferior, as regards both intelligence and organiza: 
tion, to the races of dogs, elephants, and monkeys. Nay, 
the young salmon, hatched in the motherhood of the river, 
being cradled in the soft waters, and having a small sack of 
food attached underneath, to support the first weeks of their 
infancy, are much’ better off in their nursing than these 
most advanced races. Any theory, in short, which throws 
a human child on the care of an animal parentage, is 
too. nearly absurd to require refutation. 

But there.is a scientific reason against this whole theory 
of development, which appears to be irresistible; viz., that 
it inverts the order of causes, and makes exactly that which 
distinguishes the fact of death,the author and cause of life. 
For it 1s precisely the wonder, as was just now shown, of 
the living creatures, or vital powers, that, instead of being 
under the laws of mineral substances, they are continually 
triumphing over them. Never do they fall under and 
submit to them, till they die, and this is death. Thus, 
- when.a little nodule of living matter, called an acorn, is 
placed in the ground, it takes occasion, so to speak, from 
its new conditions, begins to quicken, opens its ducts, 
starts its pumps into action, sets at work its own wondrous 
powers of chemistry, and labors on through whole cen- 
turies, composing and building on new lengths of wood. 


82 It’ IS REFUTED TOO 


til! it has raised into the sky, against gravity and the laws 
of dead chemistry, a ponderous mass of many tons weight, 
there to stand, waving in triumph over the vanquishec 
chemists of the ground, and against the raging storms of 
ages; never to yield the victory till the life grows old by 
exhaustion. Having come now to the limit of its own 
vital nature, the tree dies; whereupon the laws of inor- 
ganic matter, over which it had triumphed, fall at work 
upon it, in their turn, to dissolve it; and, between them 
and gravity, pulling it down upon the ground, it is disin- 
tegrated and reduced to inorganic dust. Now what the 
theory in question proposes is, that this same living nodule 
was originally developed, organized, and gifted with life, 
laws that have themselves 


by the laws of dead matter, 
been vanquished, as regards their force, by its dominating 
sovereignty, and never have been able to do any thing 
more than to dissolve it after it was dead. 

We are brought, then, to the conclusion, which no inge- 
nuity of man can escape, that the successive races of liy- 
ing forms discovered by geology are fresh creations, by a 
power out of nature and above it acting on nature; which, 
it will be remembered, is our definition of supernatural- 
ism itself. And this plainly is no mere indication, but an 
absolute proof, that nature is not the complete system of 
God. Indeed, we may say, what might well enough be 
clear beforehand, that, if man is not from eternity, as 
geology proves beyond a question, then to imagine that. 
mere dead earth, acted on by its chemical and electric 
forces, should itself originate sense, perception, thought, 
reason, conscience, heroism, and genius, is to assert, in the 
name of science, what is more extravagant than all the 
miracles even of the Hindoo mythology. 


BY OTHER REASONS. 83 


Theie is yet another view of nature, at once closer at 
nand and more familiar, which demands a great deal more 
of attention than it has received, from those who inelude 
all existence in the term. I speak of the conflicting and 
mutually destructive elements known to be comprised in 
it. In one view, it appears to: be a glorious and-complete 
system of order; in another, a confused mixture of tumult 
and battle.. One set of powers is continually destroying 
what another is, with equal persistency, creating; and the 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together. 
If then system is that which stands in the unity of reason, 
by what right are we able to call nature a system? That 
it is a system, or more properly part of a system, I do not 
question; for the subjective unity of reason is an instinct 
s0 powerful in our nature, or so nearly sovereign over it, 
that we can never expel the faith of such unity, even 
when it is objectively undiscoverable. What I here insist 
upon is, that nature, granting the most that can be said of 
it as a system, 1s manifestly no complete system in itself. 
On the contrary, it takes on appearances, in all its mani- 
festations, that indicate the action in it and upon it of 
powers extraneous. It seems to be no complete thing in 
itself, otherwise it would flow in courses of order and 
harmony, without any such turbulence of conflict and 
mutual destruction as we now see. We even look upon it 
as a realm played upon by forces of mischief, mixed up 
somehow with the disorders of disobedient powers, or, at 
Jeast, penally accommodated to their state of sin, as it was 
originally subordinated to their uses. Most certain it 19 
that, if cause and effect are universal, and in that view a 
complete universal system, such as our pantheistic and 
other naturalizing writers pretend,—subject to no outside 


~ 


84 DISTINCTION RAISED 


action, subordinate to no other and higher tiers of exist 
erce,—there could be no aspects of strife and tun.ult in tle 
plan; all, in such a case, must represent the necessary 
harmony and order of the system; flowing together on, 
down the easy track of its silent, smooth eternity. As it 
is, then, we have manifestly no sufficient right to speak of © 
system at all, in the proper and true meaning o: the terin, 
till we bring into the account existences above nature, 
such as have it in their way to will, and war, and bring in 
disorder, presupposing thus a plan that meludes possibilt- 
ties of strife and conflict. And then, when we speak of 
system, it will be in the sense of the apostie, when, passing 
above the mere platitudes of things, he rises, in the man: 
ner already described, to the contemplation of invisible 
dominions and powers, and of Christ, their everlasting 
head, and says inclusively of all created beimgs in heaven 
and in earth,—“ For in him all things consist.” Inthis — 
word “consist,” [standing together,] we have the essential 
and highest conception of system. Here is opened a 
vlimpse of the true system of God; any thing less, or 
lower, or different, 1s only a fiction of science, and no 
truth. 


But we come to a point more positive and decisive; viz., 
that we do positively know existences that can not be in- 
cluded in nature, but constitute a higher range, empowered 
to act upon it. This higher range we are ourselves, as 
already shown by our definition of nature and the supe- 
natural in the last chapter. By that definition we are now 
prepared to assume and formally assign the grand two- 
told distinction of things and persons, or things and pouers. 
All free intelligences, it was shown, the created and the 


BETWEEN POWERS AND THINGS. 85 


anercated, are, us being free, essentially supernatural in 
their action; having all, in the matter of their will, a 
power transcending cause and effect in nature, by which 
they are able to act on the lines and vary the combinations 
of natural causalities. They differ, in short, from every 
thing that classes under the term nature, in. the fact that 
they act from themselves, uncaused in their action. They 
are powers, not things; the radical idea of a power being 
that of an agent, or force, which acts from itself, uncaused, 
initiating trains of effect that flow from itself. 

Of the two great classes, therefore, named in our distri- 
bution, one comprehends all beings that are able to origin- 
ate new trains of effects,—these are the Powers; and the 
other is made up of such as can only propagate effects un- 
der certain fixed laws,—these are Things. At the head 
of one class we conceive is God, as Lord of Hosts; who, 
in virtue of his all-originating power as Creator, is called 
the First Cause; having round him innumerable orders of 
intelligence which, though caused to exist by Him, are as 
truly first causes in their action as He,—starting all their 
trains of consequences in the same manner. In the other 
class, we have the immense catalogue of what are called 
the natural sciences,—the astronomical bodies, the imma- 
terial forces, the fluids and solids of the world, the ele- 
ments and atoms of chemistry, the dynamics of life and 
instinct,—in all of which, what are called causes are only 
propagations of effects under and by fixed laws. Hence 
they are second causes only; that is, causes whose causa- 
tions are determined by others back of them; never, in 
any sense, originative, or first causes. ‘The completeness 
of the distribution will be yet more clear, and the im- 


mense abyss of distance between the two orders, or 
8 


86 POWERS ARE 


classes, more visibly impassable, if we add such points of 
contrast as the following:— 

Powers, acting in liberty, are capable of a double 
action,—to do, or not to do, (God, for example, in creat: 
ing, man in sinning;) things can act only in one way, 
viz., as their law determines. 

Powers are perfectible only by exercise, after they are 
made; things are perfect as made. 

Powers are perfected, or established in their law, only 
by a schooling of their consent; things are under a law 
mechanical at the first, having no consent. 

Powers can violate the present or nearest harmony, 
moving disorder in it; things are incapable of disorder, 
save as they are disordered by the malign action of 
powers. 

Powers, governed by the absolute force or fiat of omni- 
potence, would in that fact be uncreated and cease; things 
exist and act only in and by the impulsion of that fiat. 

We have thus drawn out and set before us two distinct 
orders and degrees of being, which, together, constitute 
the real universe. So perfectly diverse are they in kind, 
that no common terms of law or principle can, for one 
inoment, be imagined to include them both; they can be 
one system only in some higher and broader sense, which 
subordinates one to the other, or both to the same final 
causes. One thing is thus made clear; viz., that nature is 
not, In any proper sense, the universe. We know that it 
is not, because we find another kind of existence in our- 
selves, which consciously does not fall within the terms of 
nature. Probably the disciples of naturalism will make 
answer to this course of argument, by complaining that 
we gain our point thus easily by means of our definition 


THE PRINCIPAL MAGNITUDES. 87 


which definition is arbitrary,—drawing a distinction be: 
tween nature and the supernatural, or between things and 
powers, that is not usual. Whether it be usual or not is 
not the question, but whether it is grounded in reality and 
witnessed immediately by our own consciousness. If it 
has been the prime sophism of the naturalists, to assume 
the universality of nature, and still more if they have 
carried the assumption so far as to hold, in fact and even 
formally, that men are only things,—under the same laws 
of eternal necessity with things, and equally incapable of 
obligation, thus a part of the system of universal nature,— 
we certainly have as good a right to raise definitions, that 
meet the truth of consciousness, as they to overlook and 
hide them, in plain defiance of consciousness. There may 
be something exact in such definitions, but there certainly 
is nothing arbitrary. 

Receiving it now as a truth sufficiently established that 
nature, or the realm of things, is not the system of the 
universe, that there is beside a realm of powers, it is dif 
ficult to close the survey taken, without glancing, for a 
moment, at the relative weight and consequence of the 
two realms. When such a question is raised, there are 
many who will have it as their feeling, whether they say 
it in words or not, that the world of things preponderates 
in magnitude; for what are we doing, a great part of us, 
whether men of action or men of science, but chasing the 
shows of our senses, and magnifying their import, by the 
stimulation of our egregious idolatry? And yet it would 
seem that any most extempore giance at the world of 
powers would suffice to correct us, and set the realm of 
things, vast as it is, in a very humble place. First, we 
recognize in the grand inventory our own hunian race. 


88 NATURE ONLY A FIELD 


We cali thei persons, spirits, souls, minds, intelligences, 
free agents, and we see them moving out from nature and 
above it, consciously superior; streaming into it in cur- 
rents of causality from themselves; subduing it, develop: 
ing or detecting its secret laws, harnessing its forces, and 
using it as the pliant instrument of their will; first causes 
all, in a sense, and springs of action, side by side with the 
Creator, whose miniatures they are, whose footsteps they 
distinguish, and whose recognition they naturally aspire 
to. Next adjacent to these we have the intelligent powers 
of the astronomic worlds, and all the outlying populations 
of the sky; so numerous that we shall best conceive their 
number, not by counting the stars and increasing the 
census obtained by some factor or multiplier greater than 
the mind can definitely grasp, but by imagining the stellar 
spaces of infinity itself interfused and filled with their 
prodigious tides of life and motion. All these, like us, 
are creatures of admiration, science, will, and duty; able 
to search out the invisible in the visible, and find the foot- 
steps of God in his works. Then again, also, we recog- 
nize a vast and gloriously populated realm of angels and 
departed spirits, who, when they are sent, minister, unseen, 
about us; mixed, we know not how, in the surroundings 
of our state, with unsaintly and demoniacal powers of 
mischief, not sent nor suffered even to come, save when 
they are attracted by the low affinities we offer as open 
gates to their coming. 'T’o which, also, we are to add 
those unknown, dimly-imagined orders of intelligences, of 
which we are notified in the terms of revelation,—seraphim, 
living creatures, thrones, authorities, dominions, princi- 
palities, and powers. 

Now all these living armies or hosts of God, and God 


FOR THE POWERS, 89 


the Lord of Hosts, capable of character, society, duty, 
love,—creators all, in a sense, of things that otherwise 
could never be, first causes all of their own acts and 
doings, able to adorn what is and contrive what is not, 
and carry up the worlds themselves in ascending scales of 


lnprovement,—can we look on these and imagine that 


nature includes the principal sum and constitutes the real 
system of being? Are not these other forms of being the 
transcendent forms, and if we will inventory the universe, 
are they not all, in fact, that gives it an assignable value? 
If God Himself be a real existence, what is he, by the 
supposition, but the major term of all existence,—the all- 
containing substance, a being so great that. we scarcely 
need refer to the free populations just named, to sink all 
that is below Him, and is called nature, into comparative 
insignificance. But, when we regard Him as the Uncre- 
ated Power at the head of his immense family of powers, 
all systematized or sought to be systematized, all perfect 
in good or else to be perfected under one law, viz., the 


. eternal, necessary, immutable law of right,—a law which 


he first of all accepts himself, in which his own character 
of beauty and truth and even his felicity is based, and 
which therefore he ordains for all, to be the condition of 
their character, as of his own, building nature itself to it, 
as a field of exercise and trial; then do we, for once, catch 
a true glimpse of the significance of nature. It is no 
more that universe the philosophers speak of; it is raised 
in dignity by the relation it fills, and, for a like reason, 
sunk in quantity to comparative nothingness. Its dis: 
tances no longer occupy us, its magnitudes appall us no 
more, the astronomic splendors are tinsel; nothing is solid, 


or great, or high, but those transcendent powers whose 
S* 


90 AND THEIR EXERCISE, 


‘eternities are the main substances of the worlds, Nature, 3 
in short, is only stage, field, medium, vehicle, for the uni: 
verse; that is, for God and his powers. These are the 
real magnitudes; because they contain, at once, the import 
and the final causes, or last ends, of all created substance. 
The grand, universal, invisible system of God, therefore, 
is a system that centralizes itself in these, subordinating 
all mere things, and baving them for its instruments. For 
the serving and training of these, he loosens the bands of 
Orion and tempers the sweet influences of Pleiades; spread- 
ing out the heavens themselves, not for the heavens’ 
sakes, but as a tent for these to dwell in. Is it any thing 
new that the tent is a thing less solid and of meaner con. 
sequence than the occupant? 


CHAPTER 1¥. 


PROBLEM. OF EXISTENCE, AS RELATED TO THE FAOT OF 
EVIL. 


WE have reached a summit now, where a wider pros- 
pect opens, and God’s true system begins to reveal its out- 
lines. Nature, intelligently defined, is not, as we have 
seen, that system, but only a subordinate and humble 
member of it. The principal existences are not the things 
or magnitudes which science has for its subjects, but those 
everlasting populations of powers that inhabit the realm 

of things and do their will upon it. The real universe 
invests, or takes in nature, even as the. blooming and suc- 
culent peach gathers its fruity parts, its fibers, veins and 
circulating juices, about the nut or stone. Scientifically 
speaking, both parts together constitute the real unity of 
the peach. But, if any one should claim this distinction 
for the stone, because of its stability and because it is a 
point of inherence and a basis of reaction for the vascular 
and fleshy parts, it would be a good and sufficient reply 
that, practically, or as regarding considerations of value, 
the fruity part is all; and that, when we name the peach, 
we commonly do not so much as think of the stone, either 
as being or not being included. So it is with cause and 
effect, laws and instincts, all that we call nature; it is not 
the system of God, and is really no co-ordinate part of his 
universe, considered as related to the powers that have 
their society in it and get their reactions from it. They 
are the universe, practically, themselves; only having na: 
ture as their field and the tool-house of their instrument 
ations. 


92 POWERS NOT MANAGEABLE 


Regarding them now as powers, and so as the grand 
reality of God’s universal system, let us consider more 
carefully what their relations are to the natural forces and 
the general order of the system. They can not, by the 
supposition, be operated under laws of causation, or be, in 
any sense, included in the order of nature. As little 
admissible is it, supposing the strict originality of their 
actions, and regarding them as properly first causes each 
of his own, that they are subject to any direct control, or 
impulsion of omnipotence. We set no limits, when we 
thus speak, to omnipotence; we only say that omnipotence 
is force, and that nothing in the nature of force is appli- 
cable to the immediate direction, or determination of pow- 
ers. Ata remove one or more degrees distant, force may 
concern itself in the adjustment of means, influences, and 
motivities related to choice; or, by spiritual permeations, 
it may temper and sway that side of the soul which is 
under the control of laws, and so may raise motivities of 
thought and feeling within the soul itself; but the will, 
the man himself as a power, is manageable only in a 
moral way; that is, by authority, truth, justice, beauty, 
that which supposes obligation or command. And this, 
again, supposes a consenting obedience, and this a power 
cf non-consent, without which the consent were insignifi- 
eant. Which power of non-consent, it will be observed, is 
a power also of deviation or disobedience, and no one ean 
show beforehand that, having such a power, the subject 
will not sometime use it. _ 

So far the possibility of evil appears to be necessarily 
involved in the existence of a realm of powers; whether 
it shall also be a fact, depends on other considerations yet 
to be named. One of the most valued and most triumph- 


BY OMNIPOTENCE. 93 


antly asserted arguments of our new school of Sophists 1s 
dismissed, in this manner, at the outset. God they say is 
omnipotent, and, being omnipotent, he can, of course, do 
all things. If therefore he chooses to have no sin or 
disobedience, there will be no sin or disobedience; and if 
we fall on what is sin to us, it will only be a form of good 
to Him, and would be also to us, if we could see far 
enough to comprehend the good. The argument is well 
enough, in case men are things only and not powers; but 
if God made them to be powers, they are, by the supposi- 
tion, to act as being uncaused in their action, which ex- 
cludes any control of them by God’s omnipotent force, 
and then what becomes of the argument? Omnipotence 
may be exerted, as we just said, one degree farther off, or 
in that department of the soul which is under conditions 
of nature; but it does not follow that any changes of view, 
feeling, motive, wrought in this manner, will certainly 
suffice to keep any being in the right, when he is so far a 
power that he can even choose the Weakest and most 


worthless motive—as we consciously do in every wrong 
act of our lives. 

We dismiss, in the same short manner, the sweeping 
inferences a certain crude-minded class of theologians are 
accustomed to draw from the omnipotence of God. They 
take the word omnipotence in the same undiscerning and 
coarse way; as if it followed indubitably, that a being 
omnipotent can do every thing he really wishes to have 
done; and then the conclusion is not far off that God, for 
some inscrutable reason, wants sin, wants misery—else 
why do they exist?—therefore that the existence of sin 
and misery supposes no real breach of order, and _ that, 
when they come, they fall into the regular train of God’s 


94. WHICH IS YET NO LIMITATION 


ideal harmony, as exactly as any of the heavenl y motions, 
or chemical attractions. All such idolaters of the force 
principle in God will, of course, be abundantly shocked 
by what appears to be a limit on the sway, or sufficiency of 
their idol. And yet, even they will be advancing un- 
consciously, every day of their lives, something which 
implies a limitation as real as any they complain of. Thus, 
how often will they say, without suspecting any such 


implication, that God could not forgive sin without aran- 


som, and could not provide a ransom, save by the incar- 


nate life and death of his Son. Why not, if he is omnip- 
otent? Can not omnipotence do every thing? This very 
question, indeed, of the seeming limitation of God’s 
omnipotence, implied in the sacrifice of Christ, was the 
precise difficulty which Anselm, in his famous treatise; 
undertook to solve. He states it thus:—To show for 
what necessity and cause God, who is omnipotent, should 
have assumed the littleness and weakness of human na- 
ture, for the sake of its renewal;”* or, as he had just 
been saying,+ how he did this to restore the world, when, 
for aught that appears, “he might have done it merely by 
nis will.” | 

The difficulty was real, no doubt, to a certain class of 
minds, in his time; but to another class, inthralled by no 
such crudities in respect to force, it never was, or could be, 
any difficulty at all. As little room for question is there 
in our doctrine, when we say that a realm of powers is 
not, by the supposition, to be governed as a realm of 
things, that is, by direct omnipotence; for we mean by 


omnipotence, not power, in the sense of infiuence, or — 


moral impression, but mere executive force; we mean that 
eee 
* Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. XI, p. 737. + Ib., p. 736 


: 
} 
: 


OF OMNIPOTENCE. 95 


God, as being omnipotent, is in force to do all that force 
ean do—this and nothing more. But force has no rela- 
tion to the doing of many things. It can overturn mount- 
ains, roll back the sea, or open a way through it; but 
manifestly it has nothing to do in the direct impulsion of 
a soul; for a soul is a power, capable of character and 
responsibility, as being clear of all causation and acting by 
its own free self-impulsion. Therefore, to say that pow- 
ers, or free agents, can not be swayed absolutely by 
- omnipotent force, is only to deny the applicability of 
such force, not to place it under limitation. It might as 
well be called a limitation of the force of an army, to say 
that it-can not compute an eclipse, or write an epic; or that 
of an earthquake, to say that it can not shake a demonstra: 
tion of Euclid. 

The doctrine I am stating involves, in fact, no limita- 
tion of the power of God at all. It only shows that the 
reason of God’s empire excludes, at a certain point, the 
absolute dominion of force. Nor is it any thing new, 
more than in the question of Anselm above referred to, 
that the force of God consents to the sovereignty of his 
eternal reason, and the counsel of wisdom in his purposes. 

But it will be peremptorily required of us, at this point, 
to answer another question; viz., why God should have 
created a realm of powers, or free agents, if they must 
needs be capable, in this manner, of wrong and misery? 
Without acknowledging, for one moment, that I am re- 
sponsible for the answer of any such question, and deny- 
ing explicitly the right of any mortal to disallow or dis» 
eredit any act of God, because he can not comprehend the 
reasons of it, I will simply say, in reply, that it is enough. 
for me to be allowed the simple hypothesis that God 


96 IN A KINGDOM OF POWERS, 


preferred to have powers and not things only; because he 
loves character and, apart from this, cares not for all the 
mere things that can be piled in the infinitude of space 
itself, even though they be diamonds; because, in bestow- 
ing on a creature the perilous capacity of character, he 
bestows the highest nobility of being and well-being; a 
capacity to know, to love, to enjoy, to be consciously great 
and blessed in the participation of, his own divinity and 
character. For if all the orbs of heaven were so many 


solid Kohinoors, glittering eternally in the sun, what were 


they, either to themselves or to Him; or, if they should 
roll eternally, undisturbed in the balance of their attrac- 
tions, what were they to each other? Is it any impeach- 
ment of God that he did not care to reign over an empire 
of stones? If he has deliberately chosen a kind of em- 
pire not to be ruled by force, if he has deliberately set ins 
children beyond that kind of control, that they may be 
governed by truth, reason, love, want, fear, and the hke, 
acting through their consent; if we find them able to act 


even against the will of God, as stones and vegetables can 


not, what more is necessary to vindicate his goodness, than 
to suggest that he has given them, possibly, a capacity to 
break allegiance, in order that there may be a meaning 
and a glory in allegiance, when they choose it? 


There is, then, such a thing inherent in the system of 
powers as a possibility of wrong; for, given the possibility 
of right, we have the possibility of wrong. And it may, 
for aught that appears, be the very plan itself of God, te 
establish his powers in the right, by allowing them an ex- 
periment of the wrong, in which to-school their liberty, 
bringine them up again out of its bitterness, by a deliver 


a ars 


EVIL INHERENTLY POSSIBLR. 97 


Ing process, to shun it with an intelligent and forever f.xed 
abhorrence afterward. And then, if this should be his 
plan, what an immense complication of acts, events, pro- 
cesses, contrarieties, and caprices, must. be involved in it. 
Nature, considered as the mere run of cause and effect, is 
sunple asa jewsharp. But here we havea grand concilium, 
or republic of wills, acting each for himself, and in that 
capacity to be trained, governed, turned about and about, 
and finally brought up into the harmony of a consenting 
choice and a common love and character. The system 
will be one that systematizes the caprices and discords of 
innumerable wills, and works results of order, through 
endless complications of disorder; having, in this fact, its 
real wisdom and magnificence. Thus how meager an 
affair to thought were our American republic, if it were 
nothing but the run of causes in the climate and soil, and 
the mere physiclogy of the men; but, when it is consid- 
ered as containing so many wills, acting all from them- 
selves, incomputable in their action because they are un- 
caused in it; reducing so many mixtures of contrarieties 
and discords to a beautiful resultant order and social unity; 
striving still on, by the force of its organic nisus, toward a 
condition of historic greatness hitherto unknown to the 
world—considered thus, how truly sublime-and wonderful 
a creation does it appear to be. And yet there are many 
who can not imagine that God has any system or law, in 
his great republic of freedom, if there be any discord, any 
contrariety, any infringement of his mandates, any dis- 
turbance of nature; or indeed if he does not really in:pel 
and do every thing himself, by his own immediate and 
absoiute causation. Whereas, if they could rise above the 


feeble conceit by which they make the force of God theit 
ts] 


98 — THE PROBLEM OF EXISrENCE 


idul, they would see that, possibly, it may be the highest 
point of grandeur in his system, that it systematizes 
powers transcending nature, and even disorders in the field 
of nature itself. 

Or, if it be objected that the admission or fact of such 
disorders annihilates the unity of God’s empire, leaving it 
ina fragmentary, cloven state, which excludes the scien- 
lise idea of a proper universe, it is a good and sufficient 
answer that God’s unities are all, in the last degree, unities 
of end, or counsel as related to end; consisting never in a 
perfect concert of parts, or elements, but in a comprehens- 
ive order that takes up and tempers to its own purposes 
many antagonisms. What, in fact, is the order of heaven, 
or even the atomic order of particles, but a resultant of the 
eternal strife by which they are instigated? What then 
if the powers are able to break loose, and do, from obliga- 
tion; when the system or plan of God is made large 
enough to include such a breaking loose, and deep enough 
in counsel, from the beginning, to handle it in terms of 
sovereign order. The higher unity is not gone because 
discord has come in points below, and would not be, even 
if the discord were eternal. Still it remains, comprehends 
every thing, moving still on its ends, as little diverted or 
disturbed, as if the powers all came to wed themselves to 
it in loving obedience. There is a real universe now as 
before, because the universal nisus of the plan remains, 
and because the regulative order that comprehends so 
great irregularity retains its integrity unbroken, its equi- 
librium undisturbed. 


If now we raise the question more distinctly, what is 
the great problem of existence, as regards the order of 


A TRAINING INTO PERFECTION. 99 


powers, or the human race as being such, it is not difficult 
to answer, following out the view thus far presented, that 
it is our perfection; the perfection, that is, of our liberty, 
the schooling of our choize, or consent, as powers, so that 
we may be fully established in harmony with God’s will 
and character; unified with Him in his will, glorified with 
Him in the glory of his character, and so perfected with 
Him in his eternal beatitude. Persons or powers are crea- 
tures, we have seen, who act, not by causality, but by 
consent; they must, therefore, be set in conditions that 
invite consent, and treated also in a manner that permits 
the caprices of liberty. It is also a remarkable distinction, 
we have noted, that they are creatures perfectible only 
after they are made, while mere natural quantities and 
objects are perfect as made. Just here, accordingly, the 
grand problem of their life and of the world begins. 
They are to be trained, formed, furnished, perfected; and 
to this end are to be carried through just such scenes, ex- 
periences, changes, trials, variations, operations, as will 
best serve their spiritual perfection and their final fruition 
of each other and of God, If there are necessary perils 
in such a trial of their liberty, then they are to be set upon 
the course of such perils. Nor will it make any difference 
if the perils are such as breed the greatest speculative dif: 
ficulties. God does not frame his empire to suit and sat- 
isfy our speculations, but for our practical profit; to bring 
us up into His own excellence, and establish us eternally 
in the participation of his character. On this subject there 
would seem to be very little room for doubt. The scrip- 
ture revelation proposes this view of life, our own obser v- 
ation confirms it, and besides there is really no other in 
which even our philosophy can comfortably rest. 


100 WHICH TRAINING, AS BEING FOR, 


But this training of consent, this perfecting of liberty 
m the issues of character, it will help us at this early 
point to observe, is nothing different from a preparation 
for society and a drill-practice in the principles of society 
that 1s, in truth, in purity, in justice, in patience, forgive- 
ness, love, all the self-renouncing and beneficent virtues, 
Accordingly the course of training will itself be social; a 
trial under, in, and by society. The powers will be 
thrown together in terms of duty as being terms of society, 
and in terms of society as bemy terms of duty. Morality 
and the law of religion respect society and the condition 
of social well-being, which is the grand felicity of powers 
Things have no society, or capacity of social relations. In 
mere nature, considered as a scheme of cause and effect, 
there is nothing social, any more than there is in the mem- 
bers of a steam-engine. And if we really believe that we 
ourselves are only wheels, in the play of an all-compre- 
hending causation, it should be the end even of the feeling 
of society in us. Love, benefit, sympathy, injury, hatred. 
thanks, blame, character, worship, faith,—all that consti- 
tutes the reality of society, whether of men with God or 
ot men with each other, belongs to the fact that we are 
consciously powers. Strip us of this, let all these fruits 
be regarded as mere dynamic results, under the head of 
natural philosophy, and they will change, at once, to be 
mere tricks, or impostures of natural magic. Our disei- 
pline, therefore, is to be such as our supernatural and 
social quality requires, the discipline of society. Since it 
is for society, it must be in and by society. We accord: 
ingly shall have a training as powers among other powers, 
such as will qualify us for a place of eternal unity and 
harmony with them under God, the central and First 


MUST BE IN, SOCIETY. 101 


Power; so to be set by Him in a consolidated, everlasting 
kingdom of righteousness, and truth, and love, and peace, 

And thus it is that we find ourselves embodied in matter, 
to act as powers unon, for, with, and, if we will, against 
each other, in all the endless complications of look, word, 
act, art, force, and persuasion; in the family and in the 
state, or two and two upon each other; in marriage, frater- 
nity, neighborhood, friendship, trade, association, protec- 
ticn, hospitality, instruction, sympathy; or, if we will, in 
frauds, enmities, oppressions, cruelties, and mutual tempta- 
tions,—great_ men moving the age they live in by their 
eloquence; or shaping the ages to come by their institu- 
tions; or corrupting the world’s moral atmosphere by their 
bad thoughts, their fashions and vices; or tearing and des- 
olating all things by irruptions of war, to win a throne of 
empire, or the honors of victors and heroes. By all these 
methods do we come into society, and begin to act, each 
one, upon the trains of cause and effect in nature; thus 
upon each other, from our own point of liberty. And ac- 
cordingly society is, in all its vast complications, an ap- 
pomtment—we can not escape it. We can only say what 
kind of experience it shall be as regards the fruits of char- 
acter in us. Meantime God is reigning over it, socially 
related Himself to each member, governing and training 
that member through his own liberty. Life, thus ordered, 
is a magnificent scheme to bring out the value of law and 
teach the necessity of right as the only conservating prin- 
ciple of order and happiness; teaching the more power- 
fully that it teaches, if so it must, by disorder and sorrow, 
And nature, it will be observed, is the universal medium 
by or through which the training is accomplished. The 


powers act on each other, by acting on the lines of cause 
: oe 


102 AND SOCIETY IS CARRIED ON 


and effect in nature; starting thus new trains of events 
and consequences, by which they affect each other, in ways 
of injury or blessing. They speak and set the air m mo- 
lion, as it otherwise would not move; and so the obedient 
air, played on by their sovereignty, becomes the vehicle 
of words that communicate innumerable stings, insults, 
flatterics, seductions, threats; or tones of comfort, love 
and blessing. So of all the other elements, solid, fluid, or 
acrial—they are medial as between the powers. ‘The 
whole play of commerce in society is through nature, and 
is in fact a playing on the causes and objects of nature by 
supernatural agents. All doings and misdoings are, in 
this view, a kind of discourse in the terms of nature, by 
which these supernatural agents, viz., men, answer to each 
other, or to God, in society. Their blasphemies and pray- 
ers and songs and threats, their looks and gestures, their 
dress and manners, their injuries and alms, their blows and 
barricades and bullets and bombs, these and such hke are 
society, the grand conversation by which our social disci- 
plineiscarriedon. And itis all asupernatural transaction. 
Asa conversation in words is not reducible to mere natural 
causation, no more is that conversation in bullets and bombs 
that we call a battle. Nature could as well talk, as com- 
pound her forces in cartridges and fire them with a lev 
eled aim. Her activity in all these exchanges, or me 
dial transactions, that are carried on so briskly, is only the 
aetivity of the powers through her, and is, in fact, super 
natural. They start all these nimble couriers and set them 
flymg back and forth, by the right they have to come 
down upon nature and act themselves into it. To a cer: 


tain extent, they are inserted into nature and conditioned’ 


by it. They live in nature and are of it, up to the point of 


ee 


THROUGH NATURE. ~103 


their will, but there they emerge into qualified sovereignty. 
Without this inherence in nature they would have no me 
dia of action, no common terms of order, interest, or trial, 
and no such basis of reaction as would make the conse- 
quences of their action ascertainable, or intelligible; with- 
out this sovereignty they would not be responsible. Hence 
God's way has been, in all ages, and doubtless in all worlds, 
to set his supernatural agents in the closest connection with 
nature, there to have their action and there to perceive its 
effects on themselves and others. Even the miracles of Je- 


‘sus are set as deep in nature as possible; showing the wine 


of Cana to be made out of water, and not out of nothing; 
the multitude of the loaves out of seven, not out of none; 
that so the mind, being fastened to something already ex- 
istent, may see the miracle as a process; whereas, without 
a something in nature to begin with, there could be no 
process, and therefore nothing to observe. 

How far this range of society extends, whether nature’ 
is not, by some inherent necessity, a medium open to the 
commerce of all the powers of all worlds, involving, in 
that manner, a perilous exposure to demoniacal irruptions, 
till moral defenses and safeguards are prepared against 
them, are questions not to be answered here; but we shall 
recur to them shortly in another place. 


It has been already intimated, or shown as a possible 
thing, that the race, regarded as an order of powers, may 
break loose from God’s control and fall into sin. Will 
they so break loose? Regarding them simply as made 
and set forth on the course of training necessary to their 
establishment in holy virtue, will they retain their inno 
cence? Have we any reason to think, and if so what 


104 | PROBABILITY OF EVIN, 


reason to think, that they will drop their allegiance and 
try the experiment of evil? 

It is very certain that God desires no such result 
W hen it takes place, it will be against His will and against 
every attribute of his infinitely beneficent and pure char: 
acter. It will only be true that he has created moral and 
accountable beings with this peril incident, rather than to 
create only nature and natural things; having it in view, 
as the glorious last end of his plan, finally to clear us of 
sin by passing us, since we will descend to it, completely 
through its He will have given us, or, at least, the orig- 
inal new-created progenitors, a constituently perfect mold ; 
so that, taken simply as forms of being, apart from any 
character begun by action, they are in that exact harmony 
and perfection that, without .or before deliberation, spon- 
taneously runs to good; organically ready, with all heav- 
enly affinities in play, to break out in a perfect song. So 
far they are innocent and holy by creation, or by the 
simple fact of their constituent perfection in the image of 
their Maker; only there is no sufficient strength, or secu- 
rity in their holiness, because there is no deliberative ele- 
ment in it. Deliberation, when it comes, as come it must, 
will be the inevitable fall of it; and then, when the side of 
counsel in them is sufficiently instrueted by that fall and 
the bitter sorrow it yields, and the holy freedom is restored, 
it may be or become an eternally enduring principle. 
Spontaneity in good, without counsel, is weak; counsel 
and deliberative choice, without spontaneity, are only a 
character begun; issued in spontaneity, they are the solid 
reality of everlasting good. Still it will not, even then, 
be true that God has contrived their sin, as a means of the 
alterior good, though it may be true that they, by their 


AGAINST THE WILL CF GOD. 105 


knowledge of it as being only evil, will be intelligently 
fixed, forever afterward, in their abhorrence of it. Nor, 
if we speak of sin as permitted in this view by God, will 
it be any otherwise permitted, than as not being prevented. 
either by the non-creation, or by the uncreating of the race 

It may appear to some that such a view of God’s rela 
tions to sin excludes the fact, or faith of an eternal plan, 
showing God to be, in fact, the victim of sin; having 
neither power to withstand it, nor any system of purposes 
able to include and manage it. On this subject of fore- 
ordination or predetermined plan, there is a great deal of 
very crude and confused speculation. If there be any 
truth which every Christian ought to assume, as evident 
beyond all question, it is that God has some eternal plan 
that includes every thing, and puts every thing in its 
place. That He “foreordains whatsoever comes to pass”’ is 
only another version of the same truth. Nor is there any 
the least difficulty in distinguishing the entire consistency of 
this with all that we have said concerning God’s relations 
to the existence of evil—no difficulty, in fact, which does 
not occur in phrasing the conduct and doings even of men. 

Suppose, for example, that some person, actuated by a 
desire to benefit, or bless society, takes it in hand to estab- 
lish and endow a school of public charity. In such a case, 
he will go into a careful consideration of all the possible 
plans of organization, with a view to select the best. In 
order to make the case entirely parallel, suppose him to 
_ have a complete intuition of these plans, or possibilities— 
A, B, and C, &c., on to the end of the alphabet; so that, 
given each plan, or possibility, with all its features and 
appointments, he can see precisely what will follow—all 
the good, all the mischief, that will be incurred by every 


106 GOD STILL GOVERNS 


child that will ever attend the school. For, in each of 
these plans or possibles, there are mischiefs incident; and 
there will be children attendant, who, by reason of no 
fault of the school, but only by their perverse abuse of it, 
will there be ruined. The benefactor and founder, having 
thus discovered that a certain plan, D, combines the great- 
est amount of good results and the smallest of bad ones, 
the question rises whether he shall adopt that plan? By 
the supposition he must, for it is the best possible. And 
yet, by adopting that plan, he perceives that he will make 
certain also every particular one of the mischiefs that will 
be suffered by the abuse of it, and so the ruin of every 
child that will be ruined under it. As long as the plan is 
only a possible, a thing of contemplation, no mischiefs are 
suffered, no child is ruined; but the moment he decides to 
make the plan actual, or set the school on foot, he decides, 
makes certain, or, in that sense, foreordinates, all the par- 
ticular bad conduct and all the particular undoing there 
to be wrought, as intuitively seen by him beforehand. 
Nothing of this would come to pass if the school, D, were 
not founded; and, in simply deciding on the plan, with a 
perfect perception of what will take place under it, he 
decides the bad results as well as the good, though in 
senses entirely different. The bad are not from him, nor 
from any thing he has introduced, or appointed; put 
wholly from the abuses of his beneficence practiced by 
others whom he undertook to bless. The good is all from 
him, being that for which he established the school. Both 
ere knowingly made certain, or foreordained by his act. 
In this illustration it is not difficult to distinguish the 
truc relation of God to the existence of evil. In selecting 
the best possible plan among the millions of possibles 


BY AN ETERNAL PLAN. 107 


open to his contemplation, and deciding to set on foot, or 
actualize that particular universe, he also made certain all 
the evils, or mischiefs seen to be connected with it. But 
they are not from him because they are, in this indirect 
manner, made certain, or foreordinated by him. It is 
hardly right to say that they are permitted by him. They 
come in only as necessary evils that environ the best plan 
possible. Such are the relations of God to the existence 
of evil. If it comes, it is not from Him, any more than 
the ruin of certain children in the school, just supposed, 
are from the benevolent founder. And yet He is not dis- 
appointed, or frustrated. Still He governs with a plan, a 
perfect and eternal plan, which comprehends, in its exact 
date and place, every thing which every wrong-doing and 
revolting spirit will do, even to the end of the world. 


Thus far we have spoken of God’s relations to the ex- 
istence of evil, or its possible prevention. We pass aver 
now to the side of his subjects; and there we shall find 
reason, as regards their self-retention, to believe that the 
certainty of their sin is originally involved in their spiritual 
training as powers. Made organically perfect, set as full in 
God’s harmony as they can be, in the mold of their con- 
stitution, surrounded by as many things as possible to 
allure them to ways of obedience and keep them from the 
seductions of sin, we shall discover still that, given the 
fact of their begun existence, and their trial as persons or 
powers, they are in a condition privative that involves 
their certain lapse into evil. 

If the language I employ in speaking of this matter is 
peculiar, it is because I am speaking with caution and 
earefully endeavoring to find terms that will convey the 


108 EVIL FROM A CONDITION PRIVATIYVE, 


right, separated from any false, impression. I speak of 4 
” condition privative,” it will be observed; not of any 
positive ground, or cause, or necessity; for, if there were 
any natural necessity for sin, it-would not be sin. If it 
were caused, as all simply natural events are caused; or, 
what is the same, if it were a natural effect, it would not 
be sin. We might .as well blame the running of the 
rivers, In such a case, as the wrong doing of men; fot 
what we may call their wrong doing is, after all, nothing 
but the run of causes hid in their person, as gravity is hid 
in the running waters. If we could show a positive 
eround for sin; that man, for example, is a being whose 
nature it is to choose the strongest motive, as of a scale- 
beam to be turned by the heaviest weight, and that the 
strongest motive, arranged to operate on men, is the 
motive to do evil, that in fact would be the denial of sin, 
or even of its possibility; indeed it is so urged by the 
disciples of naturalism on every side. So again if we 
could, in a way of positive philosophy, account for the 
existence of evil—exactly what multitudes even of chris- 
tian believers set themselves to do, not observing that, if 
they could execute their endeavor, they could also make 
as good answer for evil, on the judgment-day of the 
world—if, I say, we could properly and positively account 
for evil, in this manner, it would not be evil any longer. 
When we speak of accounting for any thing, we suppose 
a discovery of first principles to which it may be referred ; 
_but sin can be referred to no first principles, it is simply 
the act of a power that spurns all inductives back of the 
docr’s will, and asserts itself, apart from all first principles, 
or even against them. Therefore, to avoid all these false 
implications, and present the simple truth of fact, J speak 


NOT FROM A GROUND POSITIVE. 108 


of a “condition privative;” by which I mean a moral 
state that is only inchoate, or incomplete, lacking some- 
thing not yet reached, which is necessary to the probable 
‘rejection of evil. Thus an infant child runs directly 
toward, and will, in fact, run into, the fire; not because of 
any necessity upon him, but simply because he is in a 
condition privative, as regards the experience needed te 
prevent him. I said also ‘involves the certain lapse inte 
evil” —not “produces,” “infers,” ‘makes necessary.” 
There is no connection of science or law between the sub- 
ject and predicate, such that, one being given, the other 
holds by natural consequence; and yet this condition 
privative “involves,” according to our way of apprehend- 
ing it, a certain conviction or expectation of the event 
stated. Thus we often attain to expectations concerning 
the conduct of men, as fixed as those which we hold con- 
cerning natural events, where the connection of cause and 
consequence is absolute. We become acquainted, as we 
say, with a certain person; we learn how he works in his 
freedom, or how, as a power acting from himself, he is 
wont to carry himself in given conditions; and finally we 
attain to a sense of him so intimate that, given almost any 
particular occasion, or transaction, touching his interest, 
we have an expectation, or confidence regarding what he 
will do, about as fixed as we have in the connections of nat- 
ural events. The particular thing done to him “involves,” 
in our apprehension, as the certain fact, that he will doa 
particular thing consequent. And yet we have no con¢ep- 
tion that he is determined, in such matters, by any causa- 
tion, or law of necessary connection; the certainty we 
fee! is the certainty, not of a thing, but of a power in the 


sovereign determination of his liberty. In this and no 
10) 


110 OUR NECESSARY DEFECT 


uther sense do we speak of a condition privative, that 
involves a certain lapse into evil. 

Having distinguished, in this careful manner, the true 
import of the terms employed, it now remains to look for 
that condition privative on which so much depends. And 
we shall discover it in three particulars. 

1. In the necessary defect of Knowledge and consequent 
weakness of a free person, or power, considered as having 
just begun to be. We must not imagine, because he is a 
power, able in his action to set himself above all natural 
causes and act originatively as from himself, that he is 
therefore strong. On the contrary, even though he begins 
in the full maturity of his person, having a constitution 
set in perfect harmony with the divine order and truth, he 
is the weakest, most unperfect of beings. The stones of 
the world are strong in their destiny, because it stands in 
God, under laws of causation fixed by Him. But free 
agents are weak because they are free; left to act originat- 
ively, held fast by no superior determination, bound to no 
sure destiny; save as they are trained into character, in 
and through their experience. ; 

Our argument forbids that we should assume the truth 
of the human genesis reported in scripture history; for’ 
that is commonly denied by naturalism. J may not even 
assume that we are descended of a common stock. But 
this, at least, is certain, that we each began to be, and 
therefore we may the more properly take the case of Ad- 
am. for an example; because, not being corrupted by any 
aauses back of him, as we most certainly are, and, making 
a beginning in the full maturity of his powers, he may be 
supposed to have had some advantages for standing ‘ast 
in the right, which we have not. 


OF KNOWLEDGE. pep 


As we look upon him, raising the question whether he 
has moral strength to stand, we observe, first of all, that 
being in a,perfect form of harmony, uncorrupted, clean, 
in one word, a complete integer, he must of course be 
spontaneous to good, and can never fall from it until his 
spontaneity is interrupted by some reflective exercise of 
contrivance or deliberative judgment. But this will come 
to pass, without fail, in a very short time; because he is 
not only spontaneous to good, but is also a reflective and 
deliberative being. And then what shall become of his 
integrity ? . 

Entering still further into his case, as we raise this ques- 
tion, we perceive that he holds a place, or point, in his ac- 
tion, between two distinct ranges of thought and motivity; 
between necessary ideas on one hand, and knowledges or 
judgments drawn from experience, on the other. In the 
first place, being a man, he has necessarily developed in 
his consciousness the law of right. He thinks the right, 
and, in thinking it, feels himself eternally bound by it. 
We may call it an idea in him, or a law, or a category of 
his being. He would not be a man without it; for it is 
only in connection with this, and other necessary ideas, 
that he ranges above the animals. Animals have no ne- 
cessary ideas; these, especially such as are moral, are the 
necessary and peculiar furniture of man. What could a 
man do in the matter of justice, inquiring after it, deter- 
mining what it is, if the idea of justice were not first de- 
veloped, as a standard thought or idea, in his mind? 
Who would set himself on inquiries after true things and 
judgments, if the idea of truth were not in him, asa regu- 
lative thought, or category of his nature? Thus it is, by 
our idea of right, that we are set to the conceiving, o1 


112 OUR NECESSARY DEFECT 


thought of duty, as well as placed under obligation itself; 
and we could not so much as raise the question of virtue 
or morality, if we were not first configured to.its law, and 
set in action as being consciously under it. Herein, too, 
we are specially resembled to God; for, by this same idea 
of right, necessary, immutable, eternal, it is that He is 
placed in obligation, and it is by His ready and perfeet 
homage to this that His glorious character is built. And 
this law is absolute or unconditional to Him as to us, to us 
as to Him. No matter what may befall, or not befall us, 
ons the empirical side of our life. No impediment, no 
threat, or fear, or force can excuse us; least of all can any 
mere condition privative, such as ignorance, inexperience, 
or the want of opposing motive. Simply to have thought 
the right, is to be under obligation to it, without any mo- 
tive or hope in the world of experience, and despite of all 
opposing motives there. Even if the worlds fall on us, 
we must do the right. 

Pass over now from the absolute or ideal side of our 
existence, to the contingent, or empirical. Here we are, 
dealing with effects, consequences, facts; trying our 
strength in attempts; computing, comparing, judging, 
learning how to handle things, and how they will handle 
us. And by this kind of experience we get all the furni- 
ture of our mind and character, save what we have as it 
were concreated in us, in those necessary ideas of which 
we have spoken, and which are presupposed in all expe- 
rience. What now, reverting to the case of Adam, as a 
just begun existence, is the amount of his experimental, 
empirical, or historic knowledge? The knowledges we 
here inquire after, it will be observed, are such as are got- 
ten historically, one by one, and one after another, under 


OF KNOWLEDGE. ELS 


conlitions of time; by seeing, doing, suffering, comparin g, 
distinguishing, remembering, and other like operations. 
A man’s knowledge here is represented, of course, by 
what he has been through, and felt, and thought. What 
then can he know, at the first moment of his being, when, 
by the supposition, he has never had a thought, or an ex- 
perience; or, if we take him at a point an hour or a day 
later, none but that of a single hour or day? Being a per- 
fectly disposed creature, the first man sets off, we will say, 
in a spontaneous obedience to the right, which is the abso. 
lute law of his nature and is in him originally, by the ne- 
cessary conditions of his nature. But there comes up 
shortly a question regarding some act, confessedly not 
right, or some act which, being forbidden, violates his 
sense of right. No matter what it is, he can be as prop- 
erly and will be as effectually tested, by adhering to the 
sense of obligation, in withholding from an apple forbid- 
den, as in any thing else. Here then he stands upon the 
verge of experimental wrong, debating the choice. What 
it is in its idea, or obligatory principle, he knows; but what 
it 1s in the experience of its fruits or consequences he 
knows not. The discord, bitterness, remorse, and inward 
hell of wrong are hidden, as yet, from his view. If mi- 
natory words have been used, pronouncing death upon 
him in case of disobedience, some degree of apprehension 
may have been awakened in him anticipatively, under the 
natural efficacy of manner and expression, which, even 
prior to any vulture of experience, have a certain degree of 
power. But how little will this amount to in a way of 
guard or security for his virtue; for he is a knowing crea- 
ture still; wanting therefore to know, and, if it were not 


for this noble instinct of knowledge, would not be a man. 
. 10% 


114 OUR NECESSARY PERIL 


What then is this wrong he is debating, what dces it signi 
fy? He does not ask whether it will bring him evil or good, 
for what these are, experimentally, he does not know. 
_Knough that here is some great secret of knowledge to be 
opened; how can he abstain, how refuse to break through 
the mask of this unknown something, and know! He is 
tempted thus, we perceive, not by something positive, 
placed in his way, but by a mere condition privative, a per- 
plexing defect of knowledge incident to the fact of his 
merely begun existence. 

Doubtless it will be urged that no such wrong would ever 
be debated, if some positive desire of the nature were not 
first excited, some constitutional susceptibility, or want, 
drawn out in longing for its object. Even so, precisely 
that we have allowed; for what is the desire of knowledge 
itself but a positive and most powerful instinct of the soul. 


Only the more clear is it that, if the desired knowledge 


were already in possession, the temptation itself would be 
over. So if some bodily appetite were excited; how trivi- 
al and contemptible were this, or any proposed pleasure, 
if only the tremendous evil and woe of the wrong were 
already known, as it will be after years of struggle and 
suffering init. The grand peril therefore is still seen 10 be 
of a privative and not of a positive nature. There must 
be positive impulses to be governed, or else there could 
not be a man, and the peril is that there is yet no experi- 
mental knowledge on hand, and can be none, sufficient to 
_ protect and guard the process. 

And yet the man is guilty if he makes the fatal choice, 
Even if the strongest motive were that way, he is yet a 
being able to choose against the strongest, and he consci- 
ously knows that he ought. In any view he is not 


{ 
4 


UNDER SUCH DEFECT. 118 


obliged to-choose the wrong, more than a child is obliged 
to thrust his hand into the blaze of a lamp, the experience 
of which is unknown. ‘The eases are, in fact, strongly 
analogous, save that the wrong-doer knows beforehand, 
as the child certainly does not, that the act -is wrong 
or criminal; a consideration by which he conscious- 
ly ought to be restrained, be the consequences what they 
may. And yet, who can expect that he will forever be 
restrained, never breaking over this mysterious line to 
make the bad experiment, or try what is in this unknown 
something eternally before his eyes! If we rightly re- 
member, the false prophet somewhere represents the diffi- 
culty of a certain course of virtue, by that of crossing the 
fiery gulf of hell upon a hair. Possibly our first man 
may cross upon this hair and keep his balance till he is 
completely over, but who will expect him to do it? He 
may look upon the tree of knowledge of good and evil, 
(rightly is it named,) and pass it by. He can do it; there 
is a real possibility as there is a real obligation; but Adam, 
we are told, did not, neither is there any the least proba. 
bility that any other of mankind, with all his advantages, 
ever would. 

If it should be apprehended by any that a condition pri- 
vative, connected as it plainly is with such perils, quite 
takes away the guilt of sin, that, I answer, is by the sup- 
position impossible. It really takes away nothing. The 
right and only true statement is, that the guilt of sin is not 
-as greatly enhanced as it would be, if all the knowledge 
needful to the strength of virtue were supplied. We dif 
fer in this matter from those naturalistic philosophers, who 
reduce all human wrong to weakness, and obliterate, in 
that manner, all the distinctions of good and evil. We 


4116 WHICH PERIL DOES NOT 


really excuse nothing; we only do not condemn as severely 
as if the eternal and absolute obligation of right, revealed 
in every human bosom, were more thoroughly fortified by 
prudential and empiric knowledge. 

It may also be objected, as contrary to all experience, 
as well as to the nature of sin itself, that sin should impart 
strength, or increase the capacity of virtue. What in 
fact does it bring, but bondage, disability, and death? 
Kven so—this is the knowledge of sin, and no one is the 
more capable of holiness on account of it. It is the very 
point indeed of this knowledge that it knows disability, 
helplessness, despair. And exactly this it is that prepares 
the possibility of a new creation. Impotence discovered 
is the capacity of redemption. And then, when a soul 
has been truly regenerated and set in union with God, its 
bad experience will be the condition of its everlasting 
stability and strength. 

It will naturally enough be objected, again, by some, 
who hold the principle of disinterested and absolute vir- 
tue here assumed, that no mere defect of empirical knowl: 
edge—the knowledge of prudence or self: interest—creates 
a condition privative as regards the security of -virtue;— 
what need of experience to enforce obligations that are 
perfect, apart from all consequences? If one is loving 
God, as he ought, simply for his own excellence or beaut y; 
and living by the inspiration of that excellence, what mat- 
ter is it whether he knows the practical bitterness, the woe, 
the hell of sin, and understands the penal sanctions of re- 
ward and penalty set against it, or not? Is he gomy to 
fall out of his love and his inspired liberty, because he is 
not sufficiently shut in to it by fears and apprehended 
miseries! There is an appearance of force in the objec: 


EXCUSE OUR SIN. tas 


tion, and vet it is only an appearance. Yor, in the first 
place, it is not assumed that Adam, or any other man, put 
to the trial of a right life, is weak in his spontancous obe- 
dience, because he is not sufficiently held to it by the pru- 
dential motives of fear and known destruction; but be- 
cause his curiosity, as a knowing creature, is provoked, or 
will be, by not so much as knowing what the motives are; 
in a word, by the profound mystery that overhangs the 
question of wrong itself. Indeed he does not even so 
much as know what it will do, whether it will raise 
to some unknown pitch of greatness in power and intelli: 
gence or not. In the next place, it is not assumed that 
the prudential motives of reward and penalty will ever 
recover any fallen spirit from his defections and bring him 
into the inspired, free state of love. The office of such 
means and motives is wholly negative; viz., to arrest the 
bad soul in its evil and bring it to a stand of self-renun- 
ciation, where the higher motives of the divine excellence 
and love may kindle it. In the third place, it is not as- 
sumed that, when souls are recovered from evil, and finally 
established in holy liberty, which is the problem of their 
trial, they are made safe for the coming eternity by know- 
ing how dreadfully they will be scorched by evil, in case 
they relapse; but their safety is that, having been dread- 
fully scorched already by it, they have thorough!y proved 
what is in it, and extirpated all the fascinations of its 
mystery. 


2. It is another condition privative, as regards the mor- 
al perfection of powers, that they require an empirical 
training, or course of government, to get them established 
in the absolute law of duty, and that this empirical train- 


L18 INHERENT NEED ALSO 


ing must probably have a certain adverse effect fur a time 
before it can mature its better results. The eternal idea 
of justice makes no one just; that of truth makes no one 
true; that of beauty makes no soul beautiful. So the 
eternal law of right makes no one righteous. All these 
standard ideas require a process or drill, in the field of 
experience, in order to become matured into characters, or 
to fashion character in the molds they supply. And this 
process, or drill-practice, will require two economies or 
courses; the first of which will be always a failure, taken 
in itself, but will furnish, nevertheless, a necessary ground 
for the second, by which its effects will be converted into 
benefits; and then the result—a holy character—will be 
one of course that presupposes both. 3 

The first named course, or economy, is that of law; 
which is called, even in scripture, the letter that killeth. 
The law absolute, of which we just now spoke, is a mere- 
ly necessary idea; commanding us, from eternity, as it did 
the great Creator himself—do right—making no specifica- 
tions and applying no motives, save what are contained in 
its own absolute excellence and authority. But the receiv- 
ing it in that manner, which is the only manner in which it 
can be truly received, supposes a mind and temper already 
configured to it, so as to be in it in mere love and the 
spontaneous homage that enthrones it because of its ex- 
cellence, and God because he represents its excellence. 
Here, therefore, is the problem, how to produce this prac- 
tical configuration, And it is.executed thus:—God, as a 
_ power and a force extraneous, undertakes for it, first of all, 
to enforce it empirically, by motives extraneous; those of 
reward and fear, profit and loss. He takes the law abso- 
lute down into the world of prudence, re-enacting it there 


OF THE LETTER THAT KILULETH, ey 


and preparing to train us into it, by a drill-practice under 
sanctions. In one view, the sanctions added are inappro- 
priate; for they are opposite 10 all spontaneity, being ap- 
peals to interest, and so far calls that draw the soul away 
from the more inspiring considerations of inherent excel- 
lence. The subject is lifted by no inspiration. He is 
down under the law, at the best, trying to come up to it 
by willing, punctuatim et seriatim, what particular things 
are required in the specifications made by it. If we could 
suppose the law thus enforced to be perfectly observed 
under this pressure of prudential sanctions, it would only 
make a dry, punctilious and painfully apprehensive kind 
of virtue, without liberty, or dignity. The more probable 
result is an habitual and wearisome selfishness; for, as long 
as the mind is occupied by these empirical and extraneous 
sanctions, it is held to the consideration of self-interest 
only; and the motives it is all the while canvassing, are 
such as the worst mind can feel, as well as that which is 
truly upright. And yet there is a benefit preparing in 
this first, or legal economy, which is indispensable; viz 
this, that it gives adhesiveness to the law, which otherwise, 
as being merely ideal, we might lightly dismiss; that the 
friction it creates, like some mordant in the dyeing process, 
sets in the law and fastens it practically, or as an experi- 
mental reality; that the woes of penalty wage a battle for 
it, in which the soul is continually worsted and so broken 
in; that it develops in short a whole body of moral 
judgments and convictions, that wind the soul about as 
cords of detention, till finally the law to be enforced be- 
comes an experimental verity fully established Just 
here the soul begins to feel a dreadful coil of thraldom 
roundit To get away from the law is impossible; for it is 


120 AS A STAGE 


hedged about with fire. To keep it is impossible; for the 
struggle is only a heaving under self-interested motive, tc 
get clear of a state whose bane is selfishness. What it 
means, the subject can not find. He is in a condition of 
bitter thraldom; his sin appears to be sin even more than 
ever; and the whole discipline he is under seems only to 
minister the knowledge of sin; he groans, as it were, un- 
der a body of sin and death that he can not heave. 

And so he is made ready for the second economy, that of 
Jiberating grace and redemption. For now, in Christ, the 
law returns, a person, clothed in all personal beauty, and 
offers itself to the choice, even as a friend and deliverer; so 
that, being taken with love to Christ, and drawing near at 
his call in holy trust, the bondman is surprised to find that 
he is loving the law as the perfect law of liberty; which 
was the point to be gained or carried. And so, what be- 
gan, as a necessary idea, is wrought into a character and 
become eternal fact. The whole operation, it will be ob- 
served, supposes a condition privative in the subject, such 
that he suffers, at first, a kind of repulsion by the law, and 
is only won to it by embracing the goodness of it in a per: 
sonal friend and deliverer. 

And something like this double administration of law 
and liberty we distinguish, in many of the matters even 
of our worldly life. No exactness of drill makes an army 
cfficient or invincible, till it is fired by some free impulse 
from the leader, or the cause; and yet the wearisome and 
tedious drill is a previous condition, without which this 
latter were impossible. No great work of genius was ever 
written in the way of work, or before the wings were 
lifted by some gale of inspiration; which gale, again, would 
never have begun to blow, had not the windows of thought 


OF TRANSITION 12) 


and the chambers of light and beauty within been opened, 
by years of patient toil and study. The artist vlods on 
wearily, drudging in the details of his art, till finally the 
inspiration takes bim and, from that point onward, his 
hand is moved by his subject, with no conscious drudgery 
or labor. In the family, we meet a much closer and 
equally instructive analogy. The young child is over- 
taken first by the discipline of the house, in a form of 
law; commanded, forbidden, sent, interdicted, all in a way 
of authority, and to that authority is added something 
‘which compels respect. If he isa ductile and gentle child, 
he will be generally obedient; but the examples are few in 
which the child will not sometimes be openly restive, or 
even stiffen himself in willful disobedience. In any case, 
it will be law, not coinciding always with the child’s wish- 
es, or his opinions of pleasure and advantage; and there 
will be a sense of constraint, more or less irksome, as if 
the authority felt were repugnant and contrary to the de- 
sired happiness. By and by, however, authority changes 
its aspect and becomes lovely. The habit of obedience, 
the experience had of parental fidelity and tenderness, and 
the discovery made of absurdity and hidden mischief in 
the things interdicted, as it seemed arbitrarily, gradually 
abolishes the sense of law and substitutes a control not 
felt before, the control of personal love and respect. So 
that, finally, the man of thirty will carefully and rever- 
ently anticipate the minutest wishes of a parent, and, if that 
ean be called obedience, will obey him; when, as a child 
of three, he could barely endure his authority, and sub- 
mitted to it only because it was duty enforced. 

Such is the analogy of common life. Law and liberty 


are the two grand terms under which it is passed—-law 
11 


122 TO SPIRITUAL LIBERTY. 


first and liberty afterward. And with all this corresponds 
what is said, in the New Testament, of law as related te 
gospel. It is said, in one view, of the laborious ritual of 
Moses; yet, by this historic reference, it is designed to 
lead the mind back into a more general and deeper truth. 
It is callea “the letter that kailleth,” as related to “the 
spit that giveth life.” It is said to have its. value in the 
development of knowledge; for by the law is “the knowl- 
edge of sin”—‘that sin by the commandment might be- 
come exceeding sinful.” It is bondage introducing and 
preparing liberty. “The law gendereth to bondage,” 
but the gospel, ‘Jerusalem that is above, is free.” “If 
there had been a law that could have given life, verily 
righteousness should have been by the law;” but that was 
impossible. ‘‘It is the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ,” 
and then, having embraced him, he becomes a new inspir-. 
ation in our love, after which we no more need “to he 
under a schoolmaster.” ‘The law made nothing perfect, 
but the bringing in of a better hope did.” , 
There is reason to suspect that many will reject what I 
am here advancing. They will do it, of course, for the 
simple reason that they know no other kind of virtue but 
that which is legal, having therefore, in their conscious- 
ness, nothing which’ answers to the liberty of the Spirit. 
To them, what I have here said will have an appearance 
of cant. Hxactly contrary to which, I affirm it as the only 
competent philosophy, perceiving, I think, as clearly as 1 
perceive any thing, that the conjunction discovered in 
Christianity of these two ininistrations is not any casual 
or accidental matter—as if men had somehow faller un- 
der law, and God was constrained, afterward, to do some- 
thing for them—on the contrary, that the whole manage- 


ee 
a 
ee 1 


A THIRD: LIABILITy 123 


ment is from before the foundation of the world, having 
respect to a grand antecedent necessity, involved in the 
perfecting of virtue. God never proposed to perfect a 
character in men by mere legal obedience. But he insti- 
tuted law originally, no doubt, as a first stage, preparatory 
to a second; both of which were to be kept on foot to- 
gether, and both of which are blended, in one way or an- 
other, probably, in the training of all holy minds in all 
worlds. 


3. There appears to be yet another condition privative, 
as regards our security against sin, in the social relation of 
powers and their trial in and through that relation; viz., 
that they are, at first, exposed to invasions of malign in- 
fluence from each other, which can nowise be effectually 
prevented, save as they are finally fortified by the defenses 
of character. In this view, if I am right, a great part of 
the problem of existence must consist in what may be 
called the fencing of powers; that is, by assorting and sep- 
arating the good from the bad, and rendering one class i1- 
accessible to the arts and annoyances of the other. 

The individual, as we have seen, is to be perfected for 
society; and, for that reason, he must needs have his trial! 
m and through society. A still wider truth appears to be 
that the perfect society thus preparing is to be one and 
universal, comprehending the righteous populations of all 
worlds and ages; for the terms of duty and religion are 
in their nature universal; and for this reason it appears 
also to be necessary, that.the trial and training should be 
in some open field of activity common to al/ the powers, 
Accordingly, as we are made with social, and, if ] may 
use the term, commercial natures; having inlets of sympa- 


‘124 TO INVASION, 


‘thy and impression, by which we may feel one another; 
capacitics to receive and give, to wrong, to offend, to com- 
fort, to strengthen, to seduce, and betray one another; so 
there is an antecedent probability that the terms of social 
exposure will involve some possibility of access, on the 
part of beings unseen, that are not of our race. Indeed, 
if it should happen that spirits are impossible to be sorted 
and fenced apart by walls of matter, or gulfs of distance, 
or abysses of emptiness, something like this would seem 
to be necessarily involved, till they are sorted and the 
gates of commerce are shut fast, by the repulsions of con- 
trary affinities, And accordingly, till this takes place, 
there must be exposures to good and malign influence, 
more numerous than we can definitely mark or distinguish. 

With this corresponds, it will be observed, all that is 
said in the scriptures of the activity of ministering angels 
engaged to confirm and comfort us, the insidious arts of a 
bad spirit to accomplish our fall, and the manifold entice- 
ments and malignant possessions of evil demons generally. 
But I advert to these representations, it will be observed, 
not in a way of assuming their authenticity, for that is for- 
bidden by the nature of my argument. I only cite them 
as offering conceptions to our mind, or imagination, that 
may be necessary to a full comprehension of what is in- 
cluded in the subject. 


Many will object most sturdily and peremptorily, I am 


well aware, to the possibility of enticements and arts, prac- 
ticed by unseen agents, to draw us off from our fidelity to 


God; alleging that such an exposure impeaches the 
fatherhood of God, and virtually destroys our responsi- - 


bility. But what if it should happen to be involved, as 
the necessary condition of any properly social existence? 


AT A GREAT DISADVANTAGE, 125 


And it might as well be urged that every temptation 1s an 
impeachment of God, which comes from sources unseen, 
being an approach that takes us off our guard, and upsets 
the balance, possibly, of our judgments, just when we are 
most implicitly confiding in them. Allowing such an ob: 
jection therefore, responsibility would be impossible; for 
who of us was ever able to see distinctly, by what avenues 
all of his temptations or enticements came? Besides, say- 
ing nothing of bad spirits, by how many methods, by air, 
look, sympathy, do we produce immediate impressions in 
each other, whose sources are never noted or suspected; 
conveying sentiments drawing to this or that, fascinating, 
magnetizing, playing upon one another, by methods as 
subtle and secret, as if the mischief came from powers cf 
darkness. And yet we never imagine that such entice- 
ments eneroach at all on the grounds of our just responsi- 
bility; and all for the manifest reason that it never mat- 
ters whence our enticements come, or by what arts the 
color of our judgments is varied and their equilibrium 
disturbed; still we know, in all cases, that the wrong is 
wrong, and knowing that is enough to complete our re- 
sponsibility. | 

I am well aware of the modern tendency to resolve 
what is said on this subject in the scripture into figures of 
speech, excluding all idea of a literal intermeddling of 
bad spirits. But that there are bad spirits, there is no 
mere reason to doubt, than that there are bad men, (who 
are in fact bad spirits,) and as little that the bad spirits are 
spirits of mischief, and will act in character, according to 
their opportunity. As regards the possession by foul spir- 
its, it has been maintained, by many of the sturdiest sup- 


porters of revelatior, and by referense to the words em- 
LL 


126 ' FROM THE ASSAULTS 


ployed in one or two cases by the evangelists themselves, 
that they were only diseases regarded in that light. Oth- 
ers have assumed the necessary absurdity of these posses: 
sions without argument; and still others have made them 
a subject of much scoffing and profane ridicule. For 
the last half-century, and contemporaneously with our 
modern advances in .science, there has been a general 
gravitation of opinion, regarding this and many other 
points, toward the doctrine of the Sadducees. Which 
makes it only the more remarkable, that now, at last, a 
considerable sect of our modern Sadducees themselves, 
who systematically reject the faith of any thing supernat- 
ural, are contributing what aid they can to restore the 
precise faith of the New Testament, respecting foul spirits. 
They do not call their spiritual visitors devils, or their de- 
monized mediums possessed persons. But the low man- 
ners of their spirits and the lying oracles which it is agreed 
that some of them give, and the power they display of 
acting on the lines of cause and effect in nature, when 
thumping under tables, jolting stoves, and floating men 
and women through the upper spaces of rooms, proves 
them to be, if they are any thing, supernatural beings; 
leaving no appreciable distinction between them and the 
_ demoniacal irruptions of scripture. For though there be 
some talk of electricity and science, and a show of reduc- 
ing the new discovered commerce to laws of calculable 
recurrence, it 1s much more likely to be established by 
_ their experiments, as a universal fact, that whatever being, 
of whatever wortd, opens himself to the visitation, or in- , 
vites the presence of powers, indiscriminately as respects 
their character, whether it be under some thin show of 
scientific practice or not, will assuredly have the commerce 


OF BAD SPIRITS. 127 


invited! Far enough is it from being either impossible, 

or incredible, and exactly this is what our new school of 

charlatanism suggests, that immense multitudes of powers, 

interfused, in their self-active liberty, through all the 

abysses and worlds of nature, have it as the battle-field 

of their good or malign activity, doing in it and upon it, 

as the scriptures testify, acts supernatural that extend to 
us. This being true, what shall be expected, but that 

where there is any thing congenial in temper or character 

to set open the soul, and nothing of antipathy to repel; 

or where any one, through a licentious curiosity, a fool- 
ish conceit of science, or a bad faith in powers of ne 
cromancy, calls on spirits to come, no matter from what 
world—ain such a case what shall follow, but that troops of 
malign powers rush in upon their victim, to practice their 
arts in him at will. I know nothing at all personally of 
these new mysteries; but if a man, as Townsend and many 
others testify, can magnetize his patient, even at the dis- 
tance of miles, it should not seem incredible that foul spir- 
its can magnetize also, This indeed was soon discovered 
in the power of spirits to come into mediums, and make 
them write and speak their oracles. It is also a curious 
coincidence that no one, as we are told, can be magnetized, 
or become a medium, or even be duly enlightened by a 
medium, who is uncongenial in his affinities, or maintains 
any quality of antipathy in his will, or temper, or charac- 
ter; for then the commerce sought is impossible. Beside 
it is remarkable that the persons who dabble most freely. 
in this kind of commerce, are seen, as a general fact, to 
run down in their virtue, lose their sense of principles, 

and become addled, by their familiarity with the BO 
of mischief. 


- 


1238 CONCLUSION REACHED. 


Tn these references to bad spirits, and the matter of de- 
monology in yveneral, I do not assume to have established 
any very decisive conclusion; for the scripture representa: 
tions can not be assumed as true, and the new demons of 
science I know nothing about, except by report. This 
only is made clear; that the suggestion of a condition pri- 
vative in men, as regards their defense against the irrup- 
tion of other powers, 1s one that can not be disproved by 
any facts within the compass of our knowledge. And 


since other powers doubtless exist, both good and > 


bad, who are being sorted and fenced apart by the con- 
trary affinities of character, nothing can be more con- 
sonant to reason than that there must be exposures to 
unseen mischief in our trial, till these eternal fences 
are raised. 


We find then—this is the result of our search—that sin 
can nowise be accounted for; there are no positive grounds, 
or principles back of it, whence it may have come. We only 
discover conditions privative, that are involved, as neces- 
sary incidents in the begun existence and trial of powers. 
‘These conditions privative are in the nature of perils, and 
while they excuse nothing, for the law of duty is always 
plain, they are yet drawn so close to the soul and open 
their culfs, on either hand, so deep, that our expectation cf 
the fall is really as pressing as if it were determined by 
some. law that annihilates liberty. Liberty we know is not 
annihilated. And yet we say, looking on the state of man 
made perilous, in this manner, by liberty, that we can not 
expect him to stand. 

Some persons, who are accustomed to receive the serip- 
tures with great reverence and whose feeling therefore is 


> 


- 
os 


THE CASE OF GOOD ANGELS © 129 


the more entitled to respect, may be disturbed by the 
apprehension, that we violate what they take for an evi- 
dently scriptural truth concerning the good angels. These 
are finite beings, and had a begun existence, and yet we are 
taught, as it will be urged, that they have never fallen; 
showing a complete possibility of creating free beings: or 
powers that will never sin;—at which point our doctrine 
is seen to come into open and direct conflict with the 
scriptures. 

I have no pleasure, certainly, in raising a conflict with 
any opinion not absolutely corrupt, when it has been so. 
long held, and with such unquestioning deference, by 
multitudes of christian believers. But I am obliged, by 
the terms of my argument, to make a revision of the evi- 
dences by which this opinion is sustained. In the Ante- 
Copernican conceptions of the universe, such an opinion 
was more likely to be taken up than now; and it seems to 
be a relic of false interpretation then introduced. I find 
no clear evidence of any such opinion in the christian 
scriptures. They do affirm the existence of good angels, 
who, for aught that appears, have all been passed through 
and brought up out of a fall, as the redeemed of mankind 
will be. They affirm the existence also of bad angels, 
who certainly have not been kept from the experiment or 
choice of evil. A significant intimation 1s supposed to be 
found in the text,—“ To the intent that now, unto the 
principalities end powers in heavenly places, might be 
known, by the church, the manifold wisdom of God ”—as 
if here, for the first time, they were to be instructed, by 
the fact of human redemption. But every thing mani- 
festly turns here on the epithet “manifold,” [roAumomdog,] 
which, in fact, means only diversified, not something new 


180 AFFORDS NO VALID 


and strange; yielding us a hint, rather, which runs exactly 
contrary to the common opinion; viz., that the heavenly 
powers discover, only through the church of our world, 
another plan of grace and mercy unfolded, different from 
their own. In respect to the “new song,” so often referred — 
to in this connection, it is sufficient to say that it is joined 
by beings not of our race, and is abundantly new as 
related to a work of redemption among men; different in — 
form and manner, as in sphere, from any other. 

But the principal or hinge text on this subject is the 
6th verse of Jude’s epistle.—‘And the angels that kept 
not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath 
reserved, &c.,”—leaving the implication, it is supposed, 
that other angels have kept their first estate, and stood 
fast in obedience. But this, it has been shown by Mr. 
Faber, in a full and somewhat overdone discussion,* is a 
totally mistaken conception of the passage. The term 
“angels,” he has shown, refers to the ‘sons of God,” 
whose apostasy is set forth in the 6th chapter of Genesis. 
The term «py, rendered “ first estate,” as denoting a moral 
condition, has no such meaning in any known example. 
It signifies rather a principate, or principality, and the rep- 
resentation is, that certain persons of the Sethite, or church 
people, growing lewd and dissolute in their life, went over 
to the corrupt Cainites and joined them in their vices, 
This also is implied in the phrase “left their own habita- 
tion,” [oxnrnpiov,] their domicil, or native place and coun- 
try; language entirely malapropos, when referred to celes- 
tial beings. Besides their crime was. not angelic—the 
“ going after strange flesh ””—and, what is yet more string- 
ent, their crime is defined by a comparison which shows 


* Three Dispensations, Vol. L., pp. 344-431. 


OR SCRIPTURAL OBJECTION. 13) 


exactly what it was—‘‘Even as Sodom and Gomorrak, 
and the cities about them, in like manner, giving 
themselves over to fornication and going after strange 
flesh,’ &¢. And finally, to render this interpretation yet 
more-certain, it is shown that Josephus, in speaking of the 
“sons of God” in Genesis, calls them angels, and uses the 
same word [apyxn,| principality, in describing their apos- 
tasy. On the whole, it does not appear that there is any 
vestige of authority, in Scripture, for the opinion that the 
good angels are beings that have never sinned. 

Contrary to this, there are many passages that, without | 
being severely pressed, might be made to indicate the fact 
that they are all redeemed spirits. Thus, where the desire 
of “angels to look into these things” is spoken of, an 
indication is given, not that they are unacquainted with 
any such fact as redemption, but of the contrary fact, that 
this appetite is whetted by their experience. Why should 
they be so eager to look into a matter wholly unknown? 
So when the angels break into the sky, at the advent of 
Christ, crying ‘Peace on earth,” they seem to know, in 
their deepest heart’s feeling already, what this “peace” 
signifies. It is remarkable also that the one only text of 
scripture that could fairly be insisted on, as a direct and 
formal declaration of scripture on this point, is that of the 
apostle, when, extolling the universal headship of Christ, 
he says what appears to be directly contrary to all these 
assumptions,—‘“ By him to reconcile all things unto him- 
self, whether they be things on earth, or things in 
heaven.” . 

Falling back then upon our own first principles, as re- 
quired by the tenor of our argument, we find that angels, 
like men, are, by the supposition, finite beings. IF finite, 


1Le2 NOT IMPLIED THAT SIN 


then are they beings who think in succession, one tling 
after another, as we do. If so, then there was a point in 
the early date, or first hours of their existence, when they 
had thought little and had little experience, and of course 
knew as little as they had thought. And so, given the 
fact of their finite and begun existence, it seems to follow, 
as a conclusion, that they were in the same weakness, or 
condition privative, with us. What then can we judge, 
bat that, probably, there is some ground-principle, or law, 
common both to them and to us, that involves them in the 
same fortunes with us, and requires a method of training 
and redemption analagous to that which is ordained for 
men? God, as we all agree, is a being who works by 
and 


system—with a glorious variety and yet by system 
it would be singular for his plan to break down in some 
little department like ours, and go straight forward to its 
mark, in other and better-contrived parts of his creation. 
How much better and more consonant also to our feeling 
to suppose that there is some antecedent necessity, inhe- 
rent in the conception of finite and begun existences, that, 
in their training as powers, they should be passed through 
the double experience of evil and good, fall and redemp- 
tion. 

At the same time Iam not anxious to carry my argu- 
ment so far; and I readily concede that it might be pre- 
sumptuous to insist on such a conclusion, as being one of 
the known truths. I only ask that a similar concession’ 

be allowed, on the other side, as regards an opinion cer- 
| tainly not authenticated by scripture; for, when that is 
taken out of the way, as being a scriptural objection te 
my argument, I have no longer any concern with it. It 
may not be amiss to add, further, that what I have 


IS ANY MEANS OF GOOD. 1838 


here advanced, in a somewhat positive form, concerning 
sin, I value mostly as an hypothesis. Indeed what we 
want, to clear cur difficulties here, is not so much a doc- 
trine, as to find that some rational hypothesis is possi- 
ble. And my object is sufficiently gained when that. is 
admitted. 

If it should be objected that my doctrine, or hypothesis 
here, is only another version of the scheme that accounts 
for sin as being the necessary means of the greatest good, 
it is enough to answer that J see no great reason to be 
concerned for it, even if it were. Still I do not perceive 
that it proposes to account for sin as being a means of any 
thing. It makes much of the knowledge of sin, or of its 
‘bitter consequences, and especially of the want of that 
knowledge, save as it is gotten by the bad experience it- 
self. But the knowledge of sin is, in fact, knowing—that 
is the precise point of it—that it is the means of nothing 
good, that it is evil in all its tendencies, relations, opera- 
tions, and results, and will never bring any thing good to 
any being. If then the knowing of sin to be the possible 
means of no good is itself a means of good, wherein does 
it appear that I am reproducing the doctrine that sin is the 
necessary means of the greatest good? Because, it may 
be answered, sin, as a fact of consciousness, is by the sup- | 
position the necessary means of. the knowledge of sin. 
But that, I reply, is a trick of argument practiced on the | 
word means. Undoubtedly sin, as a fact of consciousness, ° 
is the necessary subject of the knowledge of sin. If it 
were affirmed that the knowledge of certain sunken rocks, 
_in the track of some voyaye, 1s necessary to a safe passage, 
how easy to show, by just the argument here employed, that, 


since the rocks are a necessary means of the knowledge of 
he 


134 THE TRUE CONCEPTIUN 


the rocks, the rocks are therefore, and by necessary comse 
b] i y y 
quence, the necessary means of a safe passage! 


There is still another point, the existence of Satan, or 
the devil, and the account to be made of him, which is 
always intruded upon discussions of this nature, and can 
not well be avoided. God, we have seen, might create a 
realm of things and have it stand firm in its order; but, 
if He creates a realm of powers, a prior and eternal cer- 
tainty confronts Him, of their outbreak in evil. And at 
just this point, we are able, it may be, to form some just 
or not impossible conception of the diabolical personality. 
According to the Manichees or disciples of Zoroaster, a 
doctrine virtually accepted by many philosophers, two 
principles have existed together from eternity, one of 
which is the cause of good and the other of evil; and by 
this short process they make out their account of evil. 
With sufficient modifications, their account is probably true. 
Thus if their good principle, called God by us, is taken as 
a being, and their bad principle as only a condition pri- 
vative; one asa positive and real cause, the other as a bad 
possibility that environs God from eternity, waiting to be- 
come a fact and certain to become a fact, whenever the 
opportunity is given, it is even so. And then it follows 
that, the moment God creates a realm of powers, the had 
possibility as certainly becomes a bad actuality, a Satan, or 
devil, an esse; not a bad omnipresence over against God, 
and His equal—that is a monstrous and horrible concep- 
-tion—but an outbreaking evil, or einpire of evil in created 
spirits, according to their order. For Satan, or the devil, 
taken in the singular, is not the name of any particular 
person, neither is it a personation merely of temptation, 


OF SATAN OR THE DEVIL. 185 


31 impersonal evil, as many insist; for there is really no 
such thing as impersonal evil in the sense of moral evil; 
but the name is a name that generalizes bad persons o1 
spirits, with their bad thoughts and characters, many in 
one. That there is any single one of them who, by dis- 
tinction or pre-eminence, is called Satan, or devil, is 
wholly improbable. The name is one taken up by the 
imagination to designate or embody, in a conception the 
mind can most easily wield, the all or total of bad minds 
and powers. Even as Davenport, the ablest theologian 
of all the New England Fathers, represents, in his Cate: 
chism; answering carefully the question,—‘‘ What is the 
devil?”—thus: “The multitude of apostate angels which, 
by pride, and blasphemy against God, and malice against 
man, became liars and murderers, by tempting him to that 
sin.” 

There is also a further reason for this general unifying 
of the bad powers in one, or under one conception, in the 
fact that evil, once beginning to exist, inevitably becomes 
organic, and constructs a kind of principate or kingdom 
opposite to God. It is with all bad spirits, doubtless, as 
with us. Power is taken by the strongest, and weakness 
falls into a subordinate place of servility and abjectness. 
Pride organizes caste, and dominates in the sphere of fash: 
ion. Corrupt opinions, false judgments, bad manners, and 
a general body of conventionalisms that represent the 
motherhood of sin, come into vogue and reign. And so, 
doubtless, every where and in all worlds, sin has it im its 
nature to organize, mount into the ascendant above God 
and truth, and reign in a kingdom opposite to God. And, 
in this view, evil is fitly represented in the scripture as or- 
ganizing itself under Satan, or the devil, or the prince of 


136 THE TRUE CONCEPTION 


this world, or the prince of the power of the air;—no pu- 
ling fiction of superstition, as many fancy, but, rightly 
conceived, a grand, massive, portentous, and even tremern 
dous reality. For though it be true that no such bad om- 
hipresence is intended in the term Satan as some appear to 
fancy, there is represented in it an organization of bad 
mind, thought, and power, that is none the less imperial as 
regards resistance. 

At just this point many fall into the easy mistake of 
supposing that the bad organization finds its head in a 
particular person or spirit, who has all other bad spirits 
submissive and loyal under his will, and is called Satan as 
being their king. But they press the analogy too far, 
overlooking the fact that evil is as truly and eternally an- 
archy as organization. It is much better to understand, 
as In reference to bad spirits, what we know holds good in 
respect to the organic force of evil here among men. KHyil 
is a-hell of oppositions, riots, usurpations, in itself, and 
bears a front of organization only as against good. It 
never made a chief that it would not shortly dethrone, 
never set up any royal Nimrod or family of Nimrods it 
would not sometime betray, or expel. That the organic 
force of evil therefore has ever settled the eternal suprema- 
cy of some one spirit called devil, or Satan, is against the 
known nature of evil. There is no such order, allegiance, 
loyalty, faith, in evil as that. The stability of Satan and ~ 
his empire consists, not in the force of some personal chief: 
tainship, but in the fixed array of all bad minds, and even 
of anarchy itself, against what is good. 

As regards the naming process by which this devil, or 
Satan, is prepared, we may easily instruct ourselves by 
other analogies; sch, for example, as “the man of sin’ 


OF SATAN OR THE DEVIL. 187 


aud ‘anti-christ.’ These are the names, evidently, of 
no particular person. ‘The man of sin” is in fact all the 
men of sin, or the spirit that works in them; for the con- 
ception is that, as Christ has brought forth a gospel, so is 
is inevitable that sin will foul that gospel in the handling, 
and be a mystery of iniquity upon it. And this mystery 
of iniquity, as Paul saw, was already beginning to work, 
as work it must, till it is taken out of the way. And this 
working is to be the revelation of evil through the gospel, 
and of the gospel through evil. It includes the dogmatic 
usurpation, the priestly assumptions, the mock sacraments, 
and all the church idols, brought in as improvements—- 
every thing contributed to, and interwoven with, the gos- 
pel, by sin as a miracle of iniquity. When that process is 
carried through, the gospel will be understood; not before. 
It ts also noticeable that what the devil, or Satan, is to God 
as a spirit, that also anti-christ is to Christ, the incarnate 
God-man. Anti-christ is, in fact, the devil of Christianity, 
as Satan is the devil of the Creation and Providence. As 
the devil too is singled out and made eminent by the defi- 
nite article, so is anti-christ spoken of in the singular as 
one person. And then, again, as there are many devils 
spoken of, so also it is declared that ‘now there are many 
anti-christs.” 

Satan then is a bad possibility, eternally existing prior 
to the world’s creation, becoming, or emerging there into, 
a bad actuality—which it is the problem of Jehovah’s gov- 
ernment to master. For it has been the plan of God, in 
the creation and training of the powers, so to bring them 
on, as to finally vanquish the bad possibility or necessity 
that environed Him before the worlds were made; so to 


create and subjugate, or, by his love, regenerate the bad 
hs 


\ 
138 GOD'S PLAN NOT BROKEN UP, 


powers loosened by his act of creation, as to have them in 
eternal dominion. And precisely here is He seen in the 
grandeur of his attitude. We might yield to some opin- 
1on of his weakness, when pondering the dark fatality by 
which he is encompassed in the matter of evil; but when 
we see his plan distinctly laid, as a fowler’s when he sets 
his net; that he is disappointed by nothing, and that all 
his counsels unfold in their appointed time and order, as 
when a general marches on his army in a course of vic- 
tory; that he sets good empire against evil empire, and, 
without high words against his adversary, calmly proceeds 
to accomplish a system of order that comprehends the sub- 
jagation of disorder, what majesty and grandeur invest 
his person! Nothing which he could have done by om- 
nipotence, no silent peace of compulsion, no unconsenting 
order of things, made fast by his absolute will, could have 
given any such impression of his greatness and glory, as 
this loosening of the possibility of evil, in the purpose 
finally to turn it about by his counsel and transform it by 
his goodness and patience. What significance and sub- 
limity is there, holding such a view, in the ecstatic words 
of Christ, when just about to finish his work—“ I beheld 
Satan as lightning fall from heaven!’ Nor any the less 
when his prophet testifies after him—‘ And the great 
dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and 
Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.” ‘Now is come 
salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our Lord and 
of his Christ.” 

That salvation, strength, and kingdom, be it also ob- 
served, are not patches of mending laid upon the rent gar- 
ment of a broken plan, but issues and culminations of the 
eternal plan itself{ The cross of redemption is no after- 


BUT REACHING ON TO VICTORY. 139 


thought, but is itself the grand all-dominating idea around 
which the eternal system of God crystallizes; Jesus Christ, 
the “appointed heir of all things”——“the Lamb slain from 
the foundation of the world.” Here stands out the final end 
or cause of all things, here emerge the powers made strong 
and glorious. Weak, at first, unperfect, incomplete, they 
are now completed and glorified—complete in him, who 
is the head of all principality and power. 


CHAPTER Y. 


THE FACT OF SIN 


WE have been discussing the question of evil as & 
question of possibility, probability, prospect; we now 
come down to the question of fact—is it, or is it not a fact 
that sin exists? 

But in passing to this question, it appears to be required 
of us to state the object we have in it, and also to indicate, 
in advance, at the stage we have now reached, the course 
or drift of our argument. We propose then to show, first 
of all, the fact of sin. This being established, we shall next 
go into a computation or inspection of the effects of sin, 
and show that it is followed and must be by a general dis- 
turbance or collapse of nature; what we call nature being, 


in fact, a state of unnature induced by the penal or retri-: 


butive action of causes provoked by sin. Hence, unless 
disorder and frustration are to be eternal, a second higher 


movement is required, having force to restore the lapse of 


nature; which higher movement is the supernatural work 
of grace and redemption. In this view the unity itself of 
the system of God comprehends, it will be seen, two ranges 
of existence and operative force; nature and the supernat- 
ural; both complementary to each other; while the latter, 
comprising the powers, and all divine agencies exerted in 
their restoration, and containing all the last ends and high- 
est workings and only perfect results of God’s plan, is, by 
the supposition, chief above the other; having that to 
serve its uses, and be the organ of its exercise. The crea- 
tion therefore is made fo: Christianity, and without that, 


THE FACT OF SIN. | TH 


as a kingdom supernatural, the kingdom of nature is only 
an absurd and fragmentary existence, having no sienifi- 
cance or end. The argument will lead me, of course, tc 
an examination of some of the supernatural facts, or sup 
posed facts, of Christianity. 

I am well aware of the necessary obscurity of this. state- 
ment, but as it is offered rather to indicate the course, than 
to convey any sufficient impression, of the argument pro- 
posed, I hope it may at least satisfy the purpose in- 
tended. 

I begin then with the question, whether it is a real and 
proper fact that sin exists? In discussing this question, I 
abstain altogether from any close theologic definition of 
sin. Undoubtedly there is a something called sem in the 
christian writings, which is not action, or wrong-doing; 
something not included in the Pelagian definitions of sin, 
as commonly presented. But my argument requires me 
to look no farther at present than to this, which is the 
simplest conception of the subject; inquiring whether 
there is any such thing in the world as properly blamable 
action? Is there a transgression of right, or of law, a 
positive disobedience to God—any thing that rationally 
connects with remorse, or carries the sense of guilt as a gen- 
uine reality? Of course it is implied that the transgressor 
does what no mere thing, nothing in the line of cause and 
effect, can do—acts against God; or, what is nowise differ- 
ent, against the constituent harmony of things issued’ from 
the will of God. Hence the bad conscience, the sense of 
guilt or blame; that the wrong-doer recognizes in the act — 
something from himself, that is not from any mere princt- 
ple of nature, not from God, contrary to God. 

It appears, in one view, to be quite idle to raise this 


142 THE FACT OF SIN 


question, Why should we undertake the serious diseus 
sion of a question that «very man has settled; why argue 
for a fact that every man acknowledges? It would indeed 
be quite nugatory, if all mankind could definitely see 
what they acknowledge. But they do not, and, what 
is more, many are abundantly ingenious to escape doing 
it. In fact all the naturalism of our day begins just here, 
in the denial, or disguised disallowance of this self-evident 
and every where visible fact, the existence of sin. Some- 
times, where no such denial is intended or thought of, it 
is yet virtually made, in the assumption of some theory, or 
supposed principle of philosophy, which, legitimately car- 
ried out, conducts and will conduct other minds also to the 
formal denial, both of the fact of sin, and of that respon- 
sibility which is its necessary precondition. We have 
thus a large class holding the condition of implicit natural- 
ism, who assert what amounts to a denial of responsibility, 
and so of the possibility of sin, without denying formally 
the fact, or conceiving that any truth of Christianity as a 
supernatural religion is brought in question. Of these 
we may cite, as a prominent instance and example, the 
phrenologists, who are many of them disciples and earnest 
advocates of the Christian doctrine. Still it is not diffi- 
cult to see that, if human actions are nothing but results 
brought to pass or determined, by the ratios of so many 
quantities of brain at given points under the skull, then 
are they no more fit subjects of reward, or blame, than the 
motions of the stars, determined also by their quantities of 
matter. Therefore some phrenologists add the conception 
of a higher nacure than the pulpy quantities; a person, a 
free-will power, presiding over them and only using them 
as its incentives and instruments, but never mechanically 


OFTEN DENIED UNDESIGNEDLY. 148 


determined by them. This takes phrenclogy out of the 
conditions of naturalism and, for just the same reason, and 
in the same breath, renders sin a possibility; otherwise the 
science, however fondly accepted as the ally of Christianity, 
(a sorry kind of ally at the best,) is only a tacit and im- 
plicit form of naturalism, that virtually excludes the faith 
of Christianity. 

On the other hand, we have met with advocates of natu: 
ralism, who have not been quite able to deny the existence 
of sin, or who even assert the fact in ways of doubtful sig- 
nificance. Thus Mr. Parker, in his “Discourses of Reli- 
gion,” having it for his main object to disprove the eredi- 
bility of miracles and of every thing supernatural in 
Christianity, still admits in words the existence of sin. 
[le even accounts it one of the merits of Calvinistic and 
Lutheran orthodoxy that it “shows (we quote his own 
language,) the hatefulness of sin and the terrible evils it 
brings upon the world;”* and, what is yet more decisive, 
he represents it as being one of the faults of the moderate 
school of Protestants, that “they reflect too little on the 
evil that comes from violating the law of God.”+ And yet 
the whole matter of supernaturalism, which he is discussing, 
hinges on precisely this and nothing else; viz., the question 
whether there is any such thing as a real “violation of the 
law of God,” any “hatefulness in sin,” anv “terrible evils 
brought on the world” by means of it. For to violate 
the law of God is itself an act supernatural, out of the 
order of nature, and against the order of nature, as truly 
even as a miracle, else it is nothing. The very sin of the 
sin is that it is against God, and-every thing that comes 
from God; the acting of a soul, or power, against the eon. 


* Discourses of Religion, p. 453. t Idem, p. 465 


144 AMBIGUOUS DOCIrRINE 


stituent frame of nature and its internal harmony 
followed therefore, as in due time, we shall show, by a 
rea] disorder of nature, which nothing but a supernatu- 
ral agency of redemption can ever effectually repair. 
Of this, the fundamental fact on which, in reality, the 
whole question he is discussing turns, he takes no manner 
of notice. Admitting the existence of sin, his specula- 
tions still go on their way, as if it were a fact of no sig- 
nificance in regard to his argument. If he had sounded 
the question of sin more deeply, ascertaining what it is 
and what it involves, he might well enough have spared 
himself the labor of his book. He either would never 
have written it at all, or else he would have denied the 
existence of sin altogether, as being only a necessary con- 
dition of the supernatural. 

And we are the more confirmed in the opinion that his 
denial of supernaturalism begins in a state of mental am- 
biguity respecting sin, from the fact that exactly this am- 
biguity is manifested in his work itself’ Thus, when 
speaking of the wrongs and the oppressive inequalities 
discovered in the distributions of society, he refers them, 
if we understand him rightly, to causes in human nature, 
not to the will, in its abuse or breach of nature. He 
says,—‘ We find the root of all in man himself. In him 
is the same perplexing entithesis which we meet in all his 
works. These conflicting things existed as ideas in him, 
before they took their present concrete shape. Discordant 
causes [in his nature we understand,} have produced 
effects not harmonious. Out of man these institutions 
have grown; out of his passions or his judgment, his 
senses or his soul. ‘'aken together they are the exponent 
which indicates the character and degree of development 


OF MR. PARKER. 145 


the race has now attained.”* Out of his passions or his 
judgment, his senses or his soul! Whence then did they 
come? for this appears to be a little ambiguous. And 
what if it should happen that they came out of neither—- 
out of no ground, or cause in nature whatever, but out of 
the will as a power transcending nature. If these bitter 
wrongs of society, such as war, slavery, and the like, 
which Mr. Parker has so often denounced in terms so 
nearly violent, kindling, as it were, a hell of words in 
which to burn them before the time; if these bitter wrongs 
are nothing but developments of ‘discordant causes” in hu- 
man nature, then wherein are they to be blamed? “ Viola- 
tions of the law of God!” do God’s own causes violate his 
law? Bringing “terrible evils on the world!” how upon 
the world, when God himself has put the evils in it, as truly 
as he has put the legs of a frog in the tadpole out of which 
it grows. ‘Hatefulness of sin!” Is the mere develop- 
ment of God’s own constituted works and causes hateful? 
Is the dog-star morally hateful because it rises in July? 
But the advocates of naturalism are commonly more 
thurough and consistent; not consistent with each other, 
that is too much to be expected, but consistent with them- 
selves, in trying each to find some way of disallowing sin, 
or so far explaining it away, as to reduce it within the 
terms of mere cause and effect in nature. Thus, for 
example, Fourier conceives that what we call sin, by a 
xind of misnomer, is predicable only of society, not of the 
- individual man. Considered as creatures of God, all men, 
as truly as the first man before sin, have and continue 
always to have aright and perfect nature, in the same 
manner as the stars. He accordingly assumes it as the 


-- oe: 


Discourses of Religion, p. 12. 
18 


146 ASSUMPTION OF FOURIER, 


fundamental principle of the new scienee that— Man’s 
attractions,” lke theirs, ‘are proportioned to his destin- 
les; so that, by means of his passions, he will even 
gravitate naturally toward the condition of order and 
well-being, with the same infallible certainty as they. It 
only happens that society is not fitly organized, and that 
produces all the mischief. There really is no sin, apart 
from the fact that men have not had the science. to organ- 
ize society rightly. He does not appear to notice the fact 
that if these human stars, called men, are all harmoniously 
tempered and set in a perfect balance of inward attrac- 
tions, by them to be swayed under the laws of cause and 
effect, that fact as organization, the very harmony of the 
spheres itself. And then the assumption that society is 
not fitly organized, or badly disorganized, is simply 
absurd; not less absurd the hope that man is going to 
scheme it into organization himself. Doubtless society is 
badly enough organized, but we have no place for the faci 
and can have none till we look on men as powers, not 
under cause and effect; capable, in that manner, of sin, 
and hable to it; through the bad experiment of it, to be 
trained up into character, which is itself the completed 
organization of felicity. Under this view bad. organiza- 
tion, or disorganization, is possible, because sin is possible; 
aud will be a fact, as certainly as sin is a fact—otherwise 
neither possible, nor a fact. 

But as we are dismissing, in this manner, the 1- 
consequent and baseless theory of Fourier, there comes 
up, on the other side, exactly opposite to him, the very 
celebrated theologian of naturalism, Dr. Strauss, who in- 
verts the main point of Fourier, charging all the misdo- 
ings and miseries of the human state, commonly called 


DENIAL OF DR. STRAUSS. 147 


sins, on the individual, teaving society blameless and even 
perfect. Finding the word sin asserting a riglitful place in 
human language, he is not so unphilosophical as to insist on 
its being cast out; on the contrary, he even speaks ot “the 
sinfulness of human nature;” but by this he understands 
only that individuals must needs suffer so much of per- 
sonal mischief and defect, in a way of carrying on the 
aistoric development of the race. In this view he savs,— 
‘Humanity [2 e. taken as a whole,] is the sinless exist- 
ence; for the course of its development is a blameless one: 
pollution cleaves to the individuals only, and does not 
touch the race and its history.” ‘Sinful human nature” 
turns out, in this manner, to be the “sinless existence.” 
The individuals whom we call. “sinners” and regard as 
under ‘‘ pollution” are yet seen to be “blameless” sinners; 
so ingeniously ‘“ polluted” that the pollution which infects 
ali the individuals does not once touch the race! If there 
be any miracle in supernaturalism more wonderful than 
this, let us be informed where it is. The truth appears to 
be that Dr. Strauss could not formally deny the fact of 
sin, and yet had no place for it. He threw it, therefore,. 
into a limbo of ambiguities, where he could recognize it 
as a fact, and yet make nothing of it. 

Still there is so much of ingenuity in this method of 
getting rid of sin, the absurdity of it is disguised under so 
fine a show of philosophy, that-much weaker and less cul- 
fivated men than Dr. Strauss anticipated him in it, and, 
without knowing, as well as he, what their wise saying 
meant, were as greatly pleased as he with the plausible air 
of it. Pope rhymes it thus, a hundred ways, that,— 

‘Respecting man, whatever wrong we call 


May, must be rignt, as relative te all.” 


148 THE POPULAR LITERATURE. 


The popular literature of our time, represented by such 
writers as Carlyle and Emerson, is in a similar vein; not 
always denying sin, for to lose it would be to lose the spice 
and spirit of half their representations of humanity; but 
contriving rather to exalt and glorify it, by placing both 
it and virtue upon the common footing of a natural use 
and necessity. Glorifying also themselves in the plausi- 
ble audacity of their offense; for it is one of the frequent 
infirmities of literature that it courts effect by taking on 
the airs of licentiousness. 

But this kind of originality has now come to its limit 
or point of reaction; for, when licentiousness becomes a 
theory, regularly asserted, and formally vindicated, it is 
then no better than truth. The poetry 1s gone, and it dies 
of its own flatness. Thus we have seen a volume recently 
issued from the American press, the formal purpose of 
which is to show, even as a christian fact, the blameless: 
ness of sin; nay more, that the main object of Jesus Christ 
in his mission of love, is to disabuse the world of the im- 
posture, deliver it of the terrible nightmare of sin. Not 
to deliver it of sin itself—that is a mistake---but to deliver 
it of the conviction of sin, as an illusive and baleful mis- 
take gendered by the superstition of the world! If any 
thing can be taken for a certain proof that mankind 
are infatuated by some strange illusion, such as sin alone 
may breed, it would seem to be the fact itself that they are 
able to impose upon themselves and one another, by these 
fecble perversities that, despite of a!l the best known, 
best attested facts of life, contrive to put on still the airs 
of science and maintain the pretences of reason. 


Passing on from these oppositions of science, falsely so 


APPEAL TO OBSERVATION, 149 


called, let us refer to some of the formal proofs that a is 
an existing fact. Scripture authority is out of the ques: 
tion, which we do not regret; for the practical and palpa- 
ble evidences that meet us in the simple inspection of hu- 
manity itself are abundantly sufficient. 

The question here, it will be observed, is not whether 
men are totally depraved, or depraved at all; nor whether 
they sin continually; but simply whether they do actual- 
ly sin?—whether, in fact, sin exists? Nor is it implied 
that all sins are equally blamable; for, beyond.a question, 
great numbers of persons are steeped in contaminating in- 
fluences from their earliest childhood, and pass into life 
under the heaviest loads of moral disadvantage. Regard- 
ing their acts, nothing is sin to such, but what they do as 
sin. The object we have in view is sufficiently answered 
by the adequate proof of a single sin; for the argument of 
naturalism goes the length of denying all sin, even the 
possibility of sin; so that if one man is able, as a power, 
to break out of nature and do a sin against it, the whole 
theory is dissolved. The power of liberty that can do one 
sin, can do more; and if only one man has it, he must 
either be a miracle himself, or else other men can do the 


same. 


We begin with an appeal to observation, alleging as a 
fact that we do, by inevitable necessity, impute blame to 
acts of injury done us by others. We can as easily avoid 
making a shadow in the sun, as we can avoid a sentiment 
of blame, when we are designedly injured by a fellow 
man. We do it, not as a pettish child may pelt a thistle 
on which he has trodden, not in any dispossessed state or 


momentary fit of anger, but even after years of reflection 
leks 


150 APPEAL TO OBSERVATION. 


have passed away; nay, after we have bathed the wrong 
done us, for so long a time, in the cleansing waters of for- 
giveness. Still we condemn the wrong and must, as jong 
as we exist; our forgiveness itself implies that we do; for 
wliat is there to be forgiven, if there be nothing that we 
condemn? Thus, if there be two partners in traac, and 
one of them absconds with all the profits and funds of the 
establishment, leaving the other, with his family, victims to 
the common liabilities, and to a necessary doom, for life, of 
poverty ; by what art can either he, or they, ever manage 
to eradicate their sense of wrong, or the blame they im. 
pute to the perfidious man whose crime has been the de- 
spoiler of their life? They may forgive him, they may fol- 
Jow him with their prayers to the hour of his last breath, but 
they will pray as for a guilty man, whose crime is the bit 
terness of his life, as it has been the burden of theirs, 

Suppose now they turn philosophers and make the dis- 
covery that there is no sin, that all actions take place un- 
der the necessary law of cause and effect, and manage to 
smooth over, with this fine apology, all the crimes they 
hear of in the world; still that one man that robbed them 
of their all—how stubborn a fact is he, how unreduci- 
ble to their theory! His very name means all that sin 
ever means, and they can as easily tear out their own 
heart-strings, as they can empty that name of the blame it 
signifies. 

Or suppose a man writes a book, the precise object of 
_ which is to show that there is, and can be no such thing 
as sin, and then that his work is assaulted, as he thinks, 
with untair representations and malicious constructions, 
what will you more certainly see, than that he is out im: 
mediately against his accusers, in the most violent denun- 


APPEAL TO CONSCIOUSNESS. 151] 


auitions o: their bigotry, and the wicked untruths of thei 
criticism. Now, if the book was true, if there is no sin 
that is blamable, what have they done to be so bitterly 
blamed? What they have done is simply natural, and is 
no more to be condemned than a frosty night. It will no- 
wise diminish the force of our supposition to add that it 
might well enough be given as historic fact. In which, 
also, we may see how certainly every man’s rational and 
moral instincts will triumph, after all, over his theories and 
formal arguments, when he undertakes to deny or dis- 
- prove the fact of sin. | 

We go farther. So confident are we in this matter that, 
if there be any man living who undertakes to be consist- 
ent in the denial of sin, setting it down however firmly, as 
a point of will, never to blame any injury done to others 
or to himself, we will engage, in case he is able to spend 
four waking hours without any single thought or feeling 
of blame as against any human creature, to admit the 
truth of his doctrine. 


We have another proof, in the fact that we as positively 
and necessarily blame ourselves; not in every thing—my 
argument does not require me to go that length—enough 
that we do it on particular occasions, distinctly noted and 
remembered, And here we are bold to affirm that every 
person of a mature age, and in his right mind, remembers 
turns, or crises in his life, where he met the question of 
wrong face to face, and by a hard inward struggle broke 
through the sacred convictions of duty that rose up te 
fence him back. It was some new sin to which he had not 
vecome familiar, so much worse perhaps in degree as to be 
the entrance to him consciously of a new stage of guilt 


152 APPEAI TO CONSCIOUSNESS. 


He remembers how it shook his soul and even his body; 
how he shrunk in guilty anticipation from the new step 
of wrong; the sublime misgiving that seized him, the 
awkward and but halfpossessed manner in which it was 
taken, and then afterward, perhaps even after years have 
passed away, how, in some quiet hour of the day or wake- 
ful hour of night, as the recollection of that deed—not a 
public crime, but a wrong, or an act of vice—returned 
upon him, the blood rushed back for the moment on his 
fluttering heart, the pores of his skin opened, and a kind 
of agony of shame and self-condemnation, in one word, 
of remorse, seized his whole person. ‘This is the conscious- 
ness, the guilty pang, of sin; every man knows what it is, 

We have also observed this peculiarity in such experl- 
ences; that it makes no difference at all what temptations 
we were under; we probably enough do not even think 
of them; our soul appears to scorn apology, as if some 
higher nature within, speaking out of its eternity, were 
asserting its violated rights, chastising the insult done to 
its inborn affinities with immutable order and divinity, 
and refusing to be farther humbled by the low pleadings 
of excuse and disingenuous guilt. To say, at such a time, 
the woman tempted me, I was weak, I was beguiled, I 
was compelled by fear and overcome, signifies nothing. 
The wrong was understood, and that suffices. 

Nor is it only in these times of conscious compunction 
that we are seen to blame ourselves as transgressors. We 
do it tacitly or unconsciously, in ways that are even more 
striking. Thus it may be seen that large assemblies of 
men, not the worst of their species, not the ignorant or the 
broken-spirited victims of depression, not the felons or 
vutcasts of society, but the most intelligent, most horest 


APPEAL TO CONSCIOUSNESS 158 


and honorable, and generally most exemplary as regards 
their corduct, will come together once in seven days, ana 
sit down to the exposure and charge of their sin, without 
even a thought of offense or insult. And what is more, 
that kiad of preaching which probes them most faithfully, 
and most disturbs their consciences, will most invite their 
attendance, if only there is no violence, or fanaticism in 
the manner. Any sober and rational exposure of their 
sin, however piercing, they will submit to, take it as thei: 
privilege, and pay for it cheerfully, year by year! Why 
now is this?’ Simply because they are sinners and know 
the charge to be true. Were they charged in this manner 
with being thieves, pickpockets, or assassins, all husbands 
and wives arraigned as false, all children as parricides, all 
citizens as perjurers and traitors, all merchants and bank- 
ers as dishonest and fraudulent dealers, they would in- 
stantly repel the charge; their indignation could not be 
restrained for a moment. Nor is it any thing to say that 
they have been educated into the faith that they are trans- 
gressors, living in the guilt of sin, and submit to the charge 
as to one of their superstitions. It is not as being a dog- 
ma that. the charge has any reality to them; indeed they 
often repel it as such and deny it. It has never any pow- 
er, till itis wielded in such a manner as to stir the con- 
sciousness, and draw out thence a fresh verdict of convic- 
tion. 

We do then blame ourselves. It is one of the most real 
and tremendous facts of our consciousness; which, if a 
man will seek to explain away, by resolving it into cause 
and effect, it will yet remain, defying and scorning all his 
arguments. He knows that he himself did the sin, and no 
eause back of himself. It is a fact, selfpronouncerl in his 


154 OUR INDICATIONS »sHOW 


consciousness, and of which he can no more divest him- 
self than he can stay the consciousness, of his existence, 
Chloroform may rid him of it, but not argument. 


Again, it is a fact constantly perceived that, where 
men do not occupy themselves with thoughts of blame, 
or conscious admissions of guilt, they are yet exercised in 
ways that imply it, and prove it only the more convince 
‘ingly. The moment we look out upon the race, and 
take note of mankind, as revealed in their most super- 
ficial demonstrations, we discover that they are out of rest, 
plagued by the foul demon of guilt. A malefactor aspect 
invests their conduct. Not by altars only of sacrifice, 
smoking under every sky; not by pilgrimages, abstinen- 
ces, Vigils, flagellations of the body, selfimmolations, and 
other voluntary tortures; not by the giving way even of 
natural affection before this dreadful horror of the mind, 
yielding up the children of the body to pacify the sins of 
the soul—not by these misdirected expedients and pains 


of guilt alone do we discover its existence, but by others, 


more silent and convincing. 

Take, for a single example, the remarkable fact of a wni- 
versal shyness of God—a fact conceded by society, and 
made the basis even of a common law of politeness, 
Why is this, why is it accepted as a universal law of po- 
liteness, never to obtrude upon others the subject of re- 
ligion, or of God and the soul, without some previous 
- intimation or discovery that the subject will not be un- 
welcome. Because it is presumed not to be welcome. It 
is not because God and the soul are questionable realities— 
we love to converse of things unreal, or imaginary, as well 
a2 of those which are real. It is not because, being real, 


THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SIN. 155 


they are matters about which there are many different 
opinions—so there are about politics, literature, philoso- 
phy, science, art, and almost every other subject. It is 
not because, being real, God is not the loftiest, purest and, 
in himself, most ennobling, most inspiring, most radiant 
subject of communication; his government the richest 
fountain of wisdom; and the soul an interest to itself that 
dwarfs all others. Neither is it because a population of 
pure, angelic intelligences, occupying this same world of 
ours, and immersed in similar employments, would not 
meet the vision of God in all his works, and would not 
hasten to refresh themselves in these transcendent themes. 
The only and true explanation is that God and the soul 
are themes that move disturbance. They suggest blame, 
they lacerate, in this manner,-the comfort of the mind. 
So well understood is it that mankind are shy of God, 
and that humanity is itself the sign of a bad conscience, 
that it is tacitly voted and becomes an accepted law of 
politeness, never to approach this one proscribed subject, 
without a previous discovery that it can be done without 
offense. 

Nor is it any excuse or clearance of the sign, to say that 
manifestly such subjects ought not to be promiscuously 
spoken of in all places and circles. This weadmit. Still 
the question is, why they may not? And the only an- 
swer is, that which we have given; that men are under a 
subtle and tacit, but damning sense of blame, and can not 
bear, on all occasions, or any whefe but in the public as- 
semblies of religion, to have subiects introduced that re« 
mind them of it, and stir again the guilt of their conscience. 
There would never be any such places or occasions, in a 
population of sinless beings. 


156 WE ACT ON THE ASSUMPTION 


Ts this tacit biame then, that appears to haunt the world 
and drive it from its rest, a mere fiction? Are we still 
under cause and effect, as truly as a river flowing toward 
the ocean, only not able ourselves to discover the fact? 
Bitter hardship, that we can not be allowed the placidity 
of the river! 


We have yet another proof, in the fact that mankind © 
are seen to be acting universally on the assumption, that 
wrong is done, or is likely to be done in the world. Every 
man of business, having only ordinary intelligence, as- 
sumes it as a point of natural discretion, that he is beset 
with wrong-doers, who will take every advantage and 
selze every opportunity, and holds it as a first maxim to 
trust no man, till he has somehow given a title to confi 
dence. Not that men are generally weak, and prone to 
what is miscalled wrong, by reason of their natural infirmi- 
ty. Contrary to this, it is the very point of his concern, 
that they are so capable and so ready to be wicked in the 
use of their capacity. The smallest part of his concern is 
to look out for such as may fail him by their lack of ener- 
gy or talent, and these are a class by themselves. 'T'c 
guard against the others is his principal study, and they 
are so many, so greedy, and plausible, and false, and hasten 
to the prey by so many methods, that his only safety is in 
the presumption that every man will take advantage and 
do him a wrong if he can. 

So, in what is called family government, every thing is 
set upon a footing that anticipates wrong. Otherwise we 
might exist in a family state and never hear or think of 
a government as pertaining to it, any more than we now 
do of a government in the garden, to preside over the 


; 
THAT WRONGS ARE A GREAT PERIL 157 


conduct of the flowers. Indeed, if there is no danger of 
wrong-doing in children, the forming of perverse tempers. 
the indulgence of wicked passions, the breakir g down, by 
wills unchastened, of all sacred principles, why not suffer 
tnem to unfold naturally, as the flowers do; for even in- 
experience and neglect will as certainly blossom into vir- 
tue, if virtue it can be called, as they into their own 
odors and colors. Contrary to this, we assume the need of 
government, that is of authority, command, correction, 
that the beginnings of evil niay be checked, and principles 
of virtue established. Doubtless there is such a thing ag 
unrighteous and barbarous severity practiced in the name 
of government; still there must be government; for what- 
ever parent undertakes to act on the assumption that the 
misdoing will be only mistake, or inexperience, and no 
intended or blamable wrong, (as we understand some are 
now doing, in order to justify their theories,) will assured- 
ly find that something comes to ‘pass, in the history of 
their children, that is a great deal more like wrong than 
they could wish! 

Why, again, do we organize the civil state, why fence 
about society with laws, enforcing them by severe and 
even sanguinary punishments? If there is no blamable 
wrong in the world or danger of any, why so careful to 
defend ourselves against what our laws, by a mistake, cal! 
_ wrongs, or crimes; such as frauds, forgeries, robberies, vi- 
olations of liberty, character and chastity, murders, assas- 
sinations? Why these manifold acts of penal legislation 
against wrony-doing, if wrong, as a matter of blame, is 
out of the question, or if nothing has ever occurred in 
the world to suggest the fact, and discover the danger of 


wrong? The answer to all this will be, that what we 
14 


158 TO OUR EXISTENCE. 


call wrong, in this manner, is public evil, and. must be 
restrained, but still is not really blamable, because it 
takes place under laws of nature, and by natural neces. 
sity, Are we then expecting, in this manner, to punish 
and put a stop to the laws of nature? and so to perform, 
by legislation, the miracles we deny in our arguments? 
What means this array of courts, constables, and marshals, 
the grated prisons, the hurdles and scaffolds, the solemn 
farce of trials and penal sentences? Are they simply 
barriers or institutes of defense, in which we array causes 
against the harmful action of other causes, as the Hol- 
landers raise dykes against the sea? Then why do we 
call this “criminal law?” and why has it never occurred 
to the Hollanders to conceive that their dykes are raised 
against the criminal misdoings of the sea? 

Besides we are afraid even of the law; trying, by every 
method possible, to invent checks and balances against usur- 
pations and abuses of power; so to make power responsi- 
ble, and to hedge about even our tribunals of justice by pe- 
nal enactments against bribery, connivance, and arbitrary 
contempt of law; as if wanting still some defense against 
even our defenders, and the more terrible wrongs they 
are like to perpetrate, in the abuse of those powers which 
have been committed to their hands. And then, again, 
when the people, groaning for long years under the mis- 
rule of a tyrant, rise up against him, instigated by the woes 
they have suffered, and pluck him down from his throne, 
bring him to solemn trial and sentence him to die, do they 
lay no blame on his head, or do they only cut off the thing, 
as the blameless impediment to their rights and liberties? 

We perceive, in this manner, how the whole superstruct- 
ure of the civil order rests on the conviction that sin is in 


FORGIVENESS SUPPOSES SIN. 159 


the world. We assume it as a fact, the terrible fact, of hu- 
man existence. No one doubts it, save here and there 
some busy Sophist, who thinks to hold his theories against 
all fact and experience, and against the spontaneous, practi- 
eal judgments of the race—protected, while he does it, 1n 
the very liberty of his mind, and the life of his body, by laws 
that, under his theories, might as well set themselves to 
forbid the fermentation of substances, or to arraign and 
punish the poisonous growth of vegetables. 


We have still another class of proofs, that are more sub- 
tle and closer to what may be called the latent sense of the 
soul; and, for just that reason, as much more convincing, 
when once they are brought into the light; we speak of 
eertain sentiments that appear to be universal, and the 
natural validity of which we never suspect. 

Take, for a first example, the sentiment or virtue of for- 
giveness. Does any one doubt the reality of forgiveness? 
does any one refuse to commend forgiveness as a necessary 
and even noble virtue? Forgiveness to what? Forgive- 
ness to cause and effect, forgiveness to the weather, for- 
giveness to the mildew, or the fly that brings the blasted 
harvest? No! forgiveness to wrong, blamable and guilty 
wrong. Forgiveness and wrong are relative terms. If 
there is nothing to blame—there is nothing to forgive. 
One of two things, then, must be true; either that there 
has been some blamable wrong in the world, or else that the 
forgiveness we think of, speak of, inculcate, and commend, 
is a baseless phantom, out of all reality, as destitute of 
dignity and beauty as of solidity and truth. Indeed, there 
is no place in human language for the word, any more 
than for the naming of a sixth sense that does not exist. 


160 SATIRE AND TRAGEDY 


The pleasure we take in satire, may be cited as another 
example. ‘This pleasure consists in cauterizing, or seeing 
cauterized by wit, the perverse follies, the abortive pride, 
or the absurd airs and manners of such as morally de- 
serve this kind of treatment. Satire s supposes a free and re: 
sponsible subject, who might be seriously blamed, but can be 
more efliciently treated by this lighter method, which, in- 
stead of denouncing the guilt, plays off the absurdities, and 
mocks the sorry figure, of sin. Satire supposes demerit, or a 
blamable defect of virtue; and, where the mark is too high 
to be reached by Baitien or civil indictment, even crime 

may be fitly chastised by it. The point to be distinctly 
noted is, that there is no place for satire, and we 
have no sympathy with it, except where there i is, OF 18 sup- 
posed to be, some kind of moral delinquency or ill desert. 
No poet thinks to satirize the sea, or a snow storm, or a 
club foot, or a monkey, or a fool. But he takes a man, a 
sinning man, who has deformed himself by his excesses, 
perversities, or crimes, and against him invokes the terri- 
ble Nemesis of wit and satire’ Regarding him simply as 
a thing, under the laws of cause and effect, we should have 
as little satisfaction or pleasure in the infliction, as if it 
were laid upon a falling body. 

We have yet another and sublimer illustration, in the 
abysses of the tragic sentiment—that which imparts an 
interest so profound to human history, to the novel and 
the drama, and even to the crucifixion of Jesus himself 
The staple matter of emotion, all that so profoundly moves 
our feeling in these records of fact and fiction, is that here 
we look upon the conflict of good and bad powers, the 
glory and suffering of one, the hellish art and malice of 
the other, followed or not followed by the sublime vindica- 


SUPPOSE THE FACT OF SIN. 161 


tions of providential. justice. It is the war, actaal or im- 
agined,-of beauty and deformity, good and evil, in thei 
higher examples. In this view, we have a deeper sense 
of awe, a vaster movement of feeling, in the contempla: 
tion of a man, a mere human creature, in a character de- 
monized by passion, than we have in the rage of the sea, or 
the bursting fire-storm of a volcano; because we regard 
him as a power—a bad will doing battle with God and the 
world. Be it a Macbeth, an Othello, a Richard, a Faust, 
a Napoleon, or only the Jew Fagin, we follow him to his 
end, quivering as under some bad spell, only then to breathe 
again with freedom, when the storm of his destiny is over, 
and the wild, fiery mystery that struggled in his passion is 
solved. But suppose it were to come to us, in the heat 
of our tragic exaltation, as a real conviction, that these 
characters are, after all, only natural effects, mere frictions 
of things, acting from no free power in themselves; forth- 
with, at the instant, every feeling of interest vanishes, and 
we care no more for their petty tzmults than we do for the 
effervescence of a salt, or the skim that mantles a pool. 
All tragic movement ceases when the powers make their 
exit; for, if now we call them men, they yet are only 
things, like Lion, Wall, and Moonshine, left to fill the 
stage with their absurd mockeries. What means it now 
for the Lady Macbeth to be crying to the blood,—“ Out, 
damned spot!” if there is no longer any such thing as a 
damned spot of guilt in her murderous soul. Hxpunge 
the faith of that, and the rage of her remorse turns at once 
to comedy—that, and nothing more. 

Now, in these and other like sentiments, constantly 
brought into play, spontaneous, clear of all affectation. 


never questioned as absurdities or fictions, we encounter 
14* 


162 MISDIRECTION, NO TRUE 


sume of the sublimest, most irresistible evidences that men 
are capable of sin and are in it. If it is not so, then it is 
very clear that all the deepest sentiments of the human 
bosom are only impostures of natural weakness, destitute 
of dignity as of truth. 


Tt remains to add that the objections offered to disprove 
the existence of sin, and the solutions of what is called sin, 
advanced by the naturalists, are insufficient and futile, and 
even imply the fact itself Most of these have been 
already answered in the course of our argument—such as 
that the acting of a creature against God is inconceivable; 
for such a capacity was shown to be included in the very 
conception of a free agent, or power ;—that if God really 
desires no sin, he has all force to prevent it; for a power, 
it was shown, is not immediately controllable by force ;— 
that sin supposes a breach of God’s system; for his sys- 
tem is a system, we have seen, not of things, but of pow- 
ers, and maintains the organic nisus of its aim as perfectly 
among the discords it has undertaken to reduce and 
assimilate, as if no act of discord had occurred. Mean- 
time it will be seen that the notion of evil, most commonly 
_ advanced by the naturalizing skeptics, is one that really in- 
volves and admits the guilt of sin, even though advanced to 
clear it of the element of guilt. ‘“Misdirection” is the word 
they apply—they call it misdirection—and in this, or 
something answering to this, they universally agree. Even 
where there is only a partially developed system of natu: 
ralism, and the existence of sin is not formally denied, a 
certain affinity for this word will be discovered. Thus 
Mr. Parker, speaking of piracy, war, and the slave trade, 
suggests that these and similar evils are wrongs that come 


SYNONYM OF SIN. 163 


of the “abuse, misdirection, and disease of human na 
wure.”* This word misdirection has the advantage that it 
slips ail recognition of blame or responsibility, because it 
brings into view no real agency or responsible agent. 
And hence it becomes a favorite word, and is formally 
proposed by many advocates of naturalism, as the philo- 
sophic synonym of sin. 

Be it so then, put it down as agreed, that sin is misdi- 
rection, and that so far there is a real something in it. 
Then comes the question, who is it, what is it, that misdi- 
rects? Is the misdirection, of God? That will not be 
said. Mr. Parker uses also, it will be observed, the term 
“disease.” Will it then be said that piracy, war, and the 
slave trade are the misdirections only of disease, as when 
the hand of a lunatic, misdirected by a pressure on the 
brain, takes the life of his friend! Was it only for such 
innocent misdirection as this that Mr. Parker inveighed sc 
bitterly against the great statesman of New England, 
as having bowed himself to slavery? Wasit then the mis- 
direction of cause and effect, in the constituent principles, 
of human nature? ‘This indeed appears to be intimated in 
another place,, when it is declared that,—‘ Discordant 
causes have produced effects not harmonious.”+ Is the 
boasted system then of nature a discordant, blundering, 
misdirecting system? If so, it should not be wholly in- 
credible that nature may sometime blunder into a miracle. 
Ts it then given us, for our privilege, to look over the sad 
inventory of the world’s history, the corruptions of truth 
and religion, the bloody persecutions, the massacres of the 
good, the revolutions against oppressions and oppressors, 
and the combinations of power to crush them, if success- 


* Discourses of Religion p. 13. + Discourses of Religion, p. 12 


164 MISDIRECTION, NOT SIN. 


ful, caste, slavery and the slave trade, piracy anid war 
tramping in blood over desolated cities and empires—can 
we look on these and have it as our soft impeachment to 
say, that they are only the misdirections of discordant 
causes in human nature? ‘That has never been the sense 
of mankind, and never can be. There is no account to 
be made of these misdirections, till we bring into view 
man as he is; a power capable of misdirecting himself and 
guilty in it because he does it, swayed by no causes in or 
out of himself, but by his own self-determining will. 
Doubtless there is abundance of misdirection; almost 
every thing we know is misdirected, the world is full of it, 
‘the whole creation groaneth in the sorrows, wrongs, pun- 
ishments, and pains of it. And then we have it as -the 
true account of all, that man is the grand misdirector. 
He turns God’s world into a hell of misdirection, and that 
is his sin. Apart from this, any such thing as misdirec- 
tion is inconceivable. Nature yields no such thing; and, 
if man. is a part only of nature, under her necessary laws 
of cause and effect, there will be as little place for misdi- 
rection in his activities, as there is in the laws of chemistry, 
or even of the solar system. The plea of misdirection, 
therefore, is itself a concession of the fact of sin, which 
fact we now assume to be sufficiently established to sup: 
port and be a sure foundation for our’ future argument. 


CHAPTER VI. 


THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 


Ir is very evident that, if sin is a fact, it must be fol- 
lowed by important consequences; for, as it has a moral 
significance considered in the aspect of blameworthiness, 
guilt, penal desert, and remorse, so also it has a dynamic 
force, considered as acting on. the physical order and 
sphere of nature; in the contact and surrounding of which, 
its transgressions take effect. In one view, it is the fall 
of virtue; in the other, it is the disorder and penal dislo- 
cation both of the soul and of the world. As crime, it 
demolishes the sacred and supernatural interests of charac- 
ter; as a force, operating through and among the retribu- 
tive causes arranged for the vindication of God’s law, it is 
the disruption of nature, a shock of disorder and pain that 
unsettles the apparent harmony of things, and reduces the 
world to a state of imperfect, or questionable beauty. 

What I now propose, then, is the investigation of sin 
regarded in the latter of these two aspects; or to show 
‘what consequences it operates or provokes, in the field of 
nature. 

It is not to be supposed that sin has power to annul or 
discontinue any one of the laws of nature. The same 
laws are in action after the sin, or under it, as before. 
And yet, these laws continuing the same, it is conceivable » 
that sin may effect what is really, and to no small extent, 
a new resolution or combination, which is, to the ideally 
perfect state of nature, what disorder is to order, deformity 
to beauty, pain to peace. This, of course, it will do, if at 


| atin ARS - 


166 SIN PROVOKES 


all, by a force exerted in the material world, and through 
the laws of nature. 

At the point of his will, man is a force, we have seen, 
outside of nature; a being supernatural, because he is able 
to act on the chain of cause and effect in nature from 
without the chain. It follows then, of course, that by act- 
ing in this manner upon nature, he can vary the action 
of nature from what would be its action, were there no 
such thing as a force external to the scheme. Nature, in- 
deed, is submitted to him, as we have seen, for this very 
purpose; to be varied in its action by his action, to receive 
and return his action, so to be the field and medium of his 
exercise. 

Thus it is a favorite doctrine of our times, that tne laws 
of the world are retributive; so that every sin or depart- 
ure from virtue will be faithfully and relentlessly punished. 
The very world, we say, 18 a moral economy, and is so 
arranged, under its laws, that retribution follows at the 
heels of all sin. And by this fact of retribution, we mean 
that disease, pain, sorrow, deformity, weakness, disappoint 
ment, defeat, all sorts of groanings, all sizes and shapes of 
misery, wait upon wrong-doers, and, when challenged by 


their sin, come forth to handle them with their rugged. 


and powerful discipline. We conceive that, in this way, 
the aspects of human society and the world, are to a 
considerable degree, determined. But we do not always 
observe that nature is, by the supposition, just so far 
_ displayed under a variation of disorder and disease. First 
appear the wrongs to be chastised, which are not in- 
cluded in the causations of nature, otherwise they were 
blameless; then the laws of nature, met by these provo- 
cations, commence a retributive action. such as nature 


a ee a 


RETRIBUTIVE CONSEQUENCES, 167 


anprovoked, would never display. The sin has fallen 


into nature as a grain of sand into the eye—and as the eye 
is the same organ that it was before, having the same laws, 
and is yet so far changed as to be an organ of pain rather 
than of sight, so it is with the laws of nature, in their penal 
and retributive action now begun. Sin, therefore, is, by 
the supposition, such a force as may suffice, in a society 
and world of sin, to vary the combinations, and display a 
new resolution of the activities, of nature. The laws remain, 
but they are met and provoked by a new ingredient not 
included in nature; and so the whole field of nature, other- 
wise a realm of harmony, and peace, and beauty, takes a 
look of discord, and, with many traces of its original glory 
left, displays the tokens also of a prison and a hospital. 
Thus far we have spoken of the power there is in sin to 
provoke a different action of natural causes. It also has 
a direct action upon nature to produce other conjunctions 
of causes, and so, other results. The laws all continue 
their action as before, but the sin committed varies the 
combinations subject to their action, and in that manner 
the order of their working. Indeed, we have seen that 
nature is, to a certain extent, submitted by her laws to the 
action of free supernatural agents; which implies that 
her action can be varied by their sovereignty without dis- 
placing the laws, nay in virtue rather of the submission 
they are appointed to enforce. I thrust my hand, for ex- 
ample, into the-fire, producing thus a new conjunction of 
causes, viz., fire and the tissues of the hand; and the result 
corresponds—a state of suffering and partial disorganiza- 
tion. In doing this, I have acted only through the laws 
of nature—the nervous cord has carried down my man- 
date to the muscles of the arm, the muscles have contracted 


168 BIN ALSO PRODUCES 


obediently to the mandate, the fire has done its part, the 
nerves of sensation have brought back their report, all in 
due order, but the result is a pain or loss of the injured 
member, as opposite to any thing mere nature would have 
wrought by her own combinations, as if it were the fruit 
of a miracle. So it is with all the crimes of violence, rob- 
bery, murder, assassination. The knife in the assassin’s 
hand is a knife, doing what a knife should, by the laws 
which determine its properties. The heart of the victim is 
a heart, beating on, subject to its laws, and, when it is 
pierced, driving out the blood from his opened side, as cer- 
tainly as it before drove the living flood through the cir- 
culations of the body. But the thrust of the knife, which 
is from the assassin’s will, makes a conjunction which 
nature, by her laws alone, would never make, and by 
force of this the victim dies. In like manner, a poison 
administered acts by its own laws in the body of the 
victim, which body also acts according to its laws, and 
the result ensuing is death; which death is attributable, 
not to the scheme of nature, but to a false conjunction of 
substances that was brought to pass wickedly, by a human 
will. In all these cases, the results of pain, disorder, and 
death are properly said to be unnatural; being, in a sense, 
violations of nature. The scheme of nature included no 
such results. They are disorders and dislocations made 
by the misconjunction or abuse of causes in the scheme 
of nature. And the same will be true of all the eventa 
_ that follow, in the vast complications and chains of causes, 
to the end of the’world. Whatever mischief, or unnatural 
result is thus brought to pass by sin, will be the first link 
of an endless chain of results not included in the scheme 


ae 


_ -_  —_ ul 


NEW CONJUNCTIONS OF GAUSES. 169 


of nature, and so the beginning of an ever-widening circle 
of disturbance. And this is the true account of evil. 

But it will occur to some, that all human activities, the 
good as well as the bad, are producing new conjunctions 
of causes that otherwise would not exist. Mere nature 
will never set a wheel to the water-fall, or adjust the sub- 
stances that compose a house or a steamboat. How then 
does it appear that the results of sin are called dislocations 
or disorders, or regarded as unnatural, with any greater 
propriety than the results of virtuous industry and all 
right action? Because, we answer, the scheme of nature 
is adjusted for uses, not for abuses ; for improvement, cul- 
ture, comfort, and advancing productiveness; not for de- 
struction or corruption. Therefore, it consists with the 
scheme of nature that water-wheels, houses, and steam- 
boats should be built; for all the substances and powers 
of nature are given to be harnessed for service, and when 
they are, it is no dislocation, but only a fulfilling of the 
natural order. 

We come, also, to the same result by another and differ- 
ent process; viz., by considering what sin is in its relation 
to God and his works. In its moral conception, it is an 
act against God, or the will and authority of God. And, 
since God is every where consistent with himself, setting 
all his creations in harmony with his principles, it is of 
course an act against the physical order, as truly as against 
the moral and spiritual. Taken as a dynamic, therefore, 
it wars with the scheme of nature, and fills it with the 
turmoil of its disorders and perversities. Or, “f we take 
the concrete, speaking of the sinner himself, he is a sub- 
stance, in a world of substances, acting as he was not made 


to act. He was not made to sin, and the world was not 
15 


ae ee 
aor ae 
+ ¥ ’ 


170 SIN THE ACTING OF A SUBSIANCE, MAN, 


made to help him sin. The 1aind of God being wholly 
against sin, the cast of every world and substance is re- 
pugnant to sin. The transgressor, therefore, is a free power 
acting against Ged morally, and physically against the 
cast of every world and substance of God—acting 1n, or 
anong the worlds and substanees, as he was not made to act. 

This, too, is the sentence of consciousness. ‘I'he wrong- 
doer says within himself,—‘I was not made to act thus, 
no laws of cause and effect, acting through me, did the 
deed. I did it myself, therefore am I guilty. Had I been 
made for the sin, it had been no sin, but only a fulfill ment 
of the ends included in my substance.” And how ternbly 
is this verdict certified by the discovery that the world 
refuses to bless him, and that all he does upon it is a work 
of deformity, shame, and disorder. The very substances 
of the world answer, as it were, in groans, to the violations 
of his guilty practice. 

Suppose, then, what all denier philosophers assume, 
that nature, considered as a realm of cause and effect, is a 
perfect’system of order; what must take place in that sys- 
tem, when some one substance, no matter what, begins to 
act as it was not made to act? What can follow, but some 
general disturbance of the ideal harmony of the system 
itself? It will be as if some wheel or member in a watch, 
had been touched by a magnet and began to have an 
action, thus, not intended by the maker; every other 
wheel and member will be affected by the vice of the one. 
Or it will be as if some planet, or star, taking its own way, 


were to set itself on acting as it was not made to act; in- 
stautly the shock of disorder is felt by every other mem- 
ber of the system. Or we may draw an illustration, closer 
to probability, from the vital forms of physinlogy. A — 


AS HE WAS NOT MADE TO act. 171 


vital creature is a kind of unit, or little universe, fashioned 
by the life. Thus an eggisa complete vital system, having 
all its vessels, ducts, fluids, quantities, and qualities, ar: 
ranged to meet the action of the embryonic germ. Sup: 
pose, now, in the process of incubation, that some small 
speck, or point of matter, under the shell, should begin, as 
the germ quickens, to act as it was not made to act, or 
against the internal harmony of the process going on, 
what must be the result? Hither a disease, manifest] y, that 
stops the process, or else a deformity; a chick without a 
wing, or with one too many, or in some way imperfectly 
organized. What then must follow, when a whole order 
of substances called men, having an immense power over 
the lines of causes in the world, not only begin, but for thou: 
sands of years continue, and that on so large a scale that 
history itself is scarcely more than a record of the fact, to 
act as they were not made to act? We have only to raise 
this question, to see that the scheme of nature is marred, 
corrupted, dislocated by innumerable disturbances and 
disorders. Her laws all continue, but her conjunctions 
of causes are unnatural. Immense transformations are 
wrought, which represent, on a large scale, the repugnant, 
disorderly fact of sin. Indeed what we call nature must 
be rather a condition of unnature; apostolically represented, 
a whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together 
with man, in the disorder consequent on his sin. 

The conclusion at which we thus arrive is one that will 
be practically verified by inspection. Let us undertake 
then a brief survey of the great departments of human 
existence and the world, and discover, as far as we are 
able, the extent of the evil consequences wrought by 


sll, 


172 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


We begin with the soul or with souls. The soul, in its 
normal state, including the will or supernatura)] power, to 
gether with the involuntary powers subordinated to it by ~ 
their laws, is an instrument tuned by the key-note of the 
conscience, viz. right, to sound harmoniously with it; or 
it is a fluid, we may say, whose form, or law of erystalli- 
zation is the conscience. And then it follows that, if 
the will breaks into revolt, the instrument is mistuned in 
every string, the fluid shaken becomes a shapeless, opaque 
mass, without unity or crystalline order. Or, if we resort 
to the analogies of vital phenomena, which are still closer, 
a revolted will is to the soul, or in it, what a foreign un- 
reducible substance is in the vital and vascular system of 
the egg, or (to repeat an illustration,) what a grain of sand 
is in the eye—the soul has become a weeping organ, not 
an organ simply of sight. Given the fact of sin, the fact 
of a fatal breach in the normal state, or constitutional or- 
der of the soul, follows of necessity. And exactly this 
we shall see, if we look in upon its secret chambers and 
watch the motions of sins in the confused ferment they 
raise—the perceptions discolored, the judgments unable to 
hold their scales steadily because of the fierce gusts of 
passion, the thoughts huddling by in crowds of wild sug- 
gestion, the imagination haunted by ugly and disgustful 
shapes, the appetites contesting with reason, the senses 
victorious over faith, anger blowing the overheated fires 
of malice, low jealousies sulking in dark angles of the 
soul, and envies baser still, hiding under the skim of its 
green-mantled pools—all the powers that should be strung 
in harmony, loosened from each other, and brewing in hope- 
less and helpless confusion; the conscience meantime thun- 
dering wrathfully above and shooting dowu hot bolts of 


IN SOULS. 173 


judgment, and the pallid fears hurrying wildly about 
with their brimstone torches—these are the motions cf 
sins, the Tartarean landscape of the soul and its disorders, 
when self-government is gone and the constituent integ- 
rity is dissolved. We can not call it the natural state of 
man, nature disowns it. No one that looks in upon the 
ferment of its morbid, contesting, rasping, restive, uncon- 
trollable action can imagine, for a moment, that he looks 
upon the sweet, primal order of life and nature. No name 
sufficiently describes it, unless we coin a name and call 
it a condition of unnature. 

Not that any law of the soul’s nature is discontinued, or 
that any capacity which makes one a proper man is taken 
away by the bad inheritance, as appears to be the view of 
some theologians; every function of thought and feeling 
remains, every mental law continues to run; the disorder 
is that of functions abused and laws of operation provoked 
to a penal and retributive action, by the misdoings of an’ 
evil will. Though it is become, in this manner, a weep- 
ing organ, as we just now intimated, still it is an organ of 
sight; only it sees through tears. And the profound re- 
ality of the disorder appears in the fact that the will by 
which it was wrought can not, unassisted, repair it. To 
do this, in fact, is much the same kind of impossibility- — 
the phrenologists will say precisely the same—as for a 
man who has disorganized his brain by over-exertion, or 
by steeping it in opium, or drenching it in alcohol, to take 
hold, by his will, of the millions of ducts and fibers woven 
together in the mysterious net-work of its substance, and 
bring them all back into the spontaneous order of health 
and spiritual integrity. 

No! it is one thing to break or shatter an organization, 


15* 


174. CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


and a very different to restore it. Almost any one can 
break an egg, but not all the chemists in the world car 
make one whole, or restore even so much as the slightest 
fracture of the shell. As little can a man will back, into 
order and tune, this fearfully vast and delicate complica: 
tion of faculties; which indeed he can not even conceive, 
except in the crudest manner, by the study of a life. 


It is important also, considering the moral reactions of 
the body, and especially the great fact of a propagation 
of the species, to notice the disorganizing effect of sin, in 
the body. Body and soul, as long as they subsist in their 
organized state, are a strict unity. The abuses of one are 
abuses also of the other, the disturbances and diseases of 
one disturb and disease the other. The fortunes of the 
body must, in this way, follow the fortunes of the soul, 
whose organ itis. Sin has all its working too in the work- 
ing of the bra. ‘To think an evil thought, indulge a 
wicked purpose or passion, will, in this view, be much as 
if the sin had brought in a grain of sand and lodged it in 
the tissues of the brain. What then must be the effect, 
when every path in its curious net-work of intelligence is 
traveled, year by year, by the insulting myriads of sinning 
thought, hardened by the tramp of their feet, and dusted 
by their smoky trail. 

But we are speaking theoretically. If we turn to prac- 
tizal evidences, or matters of fact, we shall see plainly 
enough that what should follow, in the effects of sin upon 
the body, actually does follow. How the vices of the ap- 
petites and passions terminate in diseases and a final disor- 
ganization of the body, is well understood. The false con- 


junction taade by intemperi.te drink, deluging the tissues 


IN THE BODY. 175 


of the body with its liquid poisons, and reducing the body 
to a loathsome wreck, is not peculiar to that vice. The 
condition of sin is a condition of general intemperance. 
It takes away the power of self-government, loosens the 
passions, and makes even the natural appetite for food an in- 
stigator of excess. Indeed, how many of the sufferings and 
infirmities even of persons called virtuous, are known by 
all intelligent physicians to be only the groaning of the 
body under loads habitually imposed, by the untempered 
and really diseased voracity of their appetites. And if we 
could trace all the secret actions of causes, how faithfully 
would the fevers, the rheumatisms, the neuralgic and hy- 
pochondriacal torments, all the grim looking woes of dys- 
pepsia, be seen to follow the unregulated license of this 
kind of sin. Nor is any thing better understood than 
that whatever vice of the mind—wounded pride, unregu- 
lated ambition, hatred, covetousness, fear, inordinate care 
—throws the mind out of rest, throws the body out of rest 
also. Thus it is that sin, in all its forms, becomes a pow- 
er of bodily disturbance, shattering the nerves, inflaming 
the tissues, distempering the secretions, and brewing a 
general ferment of disease. In one view, the body is a 
_ kind of perpetual crystallization, and the crystal of true 
health can ‘not form itself under sin, because the body hag, 
within, a perpetual agitating cause, which forbids the pro- 
cess. If then, looking round upon the great field of hu- 
Inanity, and noting the almost universal working of dis- 
ease, in so many forms and varieties that they can not be 
named or counted, we sometimes exclaim with a sigh, what 
a hospital the world is! we must be dull spectators, if we 
step at this, and do not also connect the remembrance that 
sim is in the world; a gangrene of the mind, poisoning all 


176 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


the roots of health and making visible its woes, by se 
many woes of bodily disease and death. | 

The particular question, whether bodily mortality has 
entered the world by sin, we will not discuss. That is 
principally a scripture question, and the word of sertp 
ture is not to be assumed in my argument. There obvi: 
ously might have been a mode of translation to the second 
life, that should have none of the painful and revolting 
incidents which constitute the essential reality of. death. 
We do moreover know that a very considerable share of 
the diseases and deaths of our race are the natural effects 
of sin or wrong-doing. ‘There is great reason also to sus- 
pect, so devastating is the power of moral ‘evil, that the 
infections and deadly plagues of the world are somehow 
generated by this cause. They seem to have their spring 
in some new virus of death, and this new virus must . 
have been somewhere and somehow distilled, or generated. 
We can not refer them to mineral causes, or vegetable, or 
animal, which are nearly invariable, and they seem, as they 
begin their spread at some given locality, to have a hu- 
manly personal origin. ‘That the virus of a poisonous 
and deadly contagion has been generated by human vices, 
we know, as a familiar fact of history; which makes it the 
more probable that other pestilential contagions have been 
generated in the deteriorated populations and sweltering 
vices of the East, whence our plagues are mostly derived. 
On this point we assert nothing as a truth positively dis- 
covered; we only design, by these references, to suggest 
the possible (and, to us, probable,) extent and power of 
that ferment, brewed by the instigations of sin, in the dis- 
eased populations of the world. What we suggest re 
specting the virus of the world’s plagues may be trae, or 


IN SOCIETY. 177 


it may not; this at least is shown beyond all question, that 
sin is a wide-spreading, dreadful power of bodily distem- 
per and disorganization, which is the point of principal 
consequence to our argument. 


Passing now to society and the disorganizing effects of 
sin there to appear, we see, at a glance, that if the soul 
and body are both distempered and reduced to a state of 
unnature, the great interest of society must suffer in a 
correspondent manner and degree. Considered as a growth 
or propagation, humanity is, in some very important sense, 
an organic whole. If the races are not all descended of a 
single pair, but of several or even many pairs, as 1s now 
strenuously asserted by some, both on grounds of science 
and of scripture interpretation, still it makes no difference 
as regards the matter of their practical and properly relig- 
ious unity. The genus humanity is still a single genus 
comprehending the races, and we know from geology that 
they had a begun existence. That they also sinned, at the 
beginning, is as clear, from the considerations already ad- 
vanced, as if they had been one. Whence it follows that 
descendants of the sinning pair, or pairs, born of natures 
thrown out of harmony and corrupted by sin, could not, on 
principles of physiology, apart from scripture teachings, 
be unaffected by the distempers of their parentage. ‘They 
must be constituently injured, or depravated. It 1s not 
even supposable that organic natures, injured and disord- 
cred, as we have seen that human bodies are by sin, should 
propagate their life in a progeny unmarred and perfect. 
Tf we speak of sin as action, their children may be inno- 
cent, and so far may reveal the loveliness of innocence ;— 
still the crystalline order is broken; the passions, tempers 


178 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN,. 


appetites, are not in the proportions of harmony and rea- 
son; the balance of original health is gone by anticipation ; 
and a distempered action is begun, whose affinities sort 
with evil rather than with good. It is as if, by their own 
sin, they had just so far distempered their organization. 
Thus far the fruit of sin isin therm. And this the scrip: 
tures, in a certain popular, comprehensive way, sometimes 
call ‘“‘sin;” because it is a condition of depravation that 
may well enough be taken as the root of a guilty, sinning 
life. They do not undertake to settle metaphysically the 
point where personal guilt commences, but only suit their 
convenience in a comprehensive term that designates the 
race as sinners; passing by those speculative questions 
that only divert attention from the salvation provided for 
a world of sinners. The doctrine of physiology there- 
fore‘is the doctrine of original sin, and we are held to in- 
evitable orthodoxy by it, even if the scriptures are cust 
away. 

But if the laws of propagation contain the fact, in this 
manner, of an organic depravation of humanity or human 
society, under sin once broken loose, many will apprehend in 
such a fact, some ground of impeachment against God; as if 
he had set us on our trial, under terms of the sorest disadvan- 
tage. If we start, they ask, under conditions of hereditary 
damage, with natures depravated and affinities already dis- 
tempered by the sin of progenitors, as truly as if we had 
commenced the bad life ourselves, what is our bad life 
when we begin it, but the natural issue of our hopeless, 
misbegotten constitution? It is no sufficient answer to say 
that no blame attaches to the mere depravation supposed, 
whether it be called sin or by any other name; it shocks 
them to hear it even suggested, that a good being like 


IN SOCIETY. 179 


God ean have set us forth in our trial, under such immense 
disadvantages. Probably enough they assail the doe- 
trine of inherited depravity, in terms of fiery denuncia- 
tion, whether taken as a dogma set up by theologians, or 
as being affirmed by christian revelation itself; not ob- 
serving that it is the inevitable fact also of human histo- 
ry; and, admitting the fact of sin, a necessary deduction 
even of physiological science. 

Now so far from admitting the supposed disadvantage 
incurred by this organic depravation of the race, or the 
mode of existence to which it pertains as a natural incl- 
dent, we are led to an opinion exactly opposite. Indeed 
there appears to be no other way possible, in which the 
race could have been set forth on their trial, with as good 
chances of a successful and happy issue. 

Thus, taking it for granted, that God is to create a 
moral population, or a population of free intelligences, 
that, having a begun existence, are to be educated into, and 
finally established in, good, there were obviously two 
methods possible. They might always be ereated outright 
in full volume, like so many Adams, only to exist inde- 
pendently and apart from all reproductive arrangements, 
or they might be introduced, as we are, in the frail and 
barely initiated existence of the infantile state, each genera- 
tion born of the preceding, and altogether composing a 
rigidly constituent organic unity of races. 

In the former case they would have the advantage of a 
perfectly uncorrupted nature, and, if that be any advant- 
age, of a full maturity in what may be called the raw sta- 
ple of their functions. But such advantages amount to 
scarcely more than the opportunity of a greater and more 
tremendous peril; for, being all, by supposition, under 


180 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


the same conditions privative with the first mar of scrip 
ture,* they would as certainly do the same things, de. 
scending to the same bad experiment, to be involved in 
the same consequent fall and disorder. They would only 
be more strictly original in their depravation, having it as 
the fruit of their own guilty choices. 

And then, as regards all mitigating and restoring influ- 
ences, the comparative disadvantage would be immense. 
Self-centered now, every man in his sin, and having no 
ligatures of race and family and family affection to bind 
them together, the selfishness of their fall would be un- 
qualified, softened by no mitigations. Spiritual love they 
can not understand, because they never have felt the natu 
ral love of sex, family, and kindred, by which, under con. 
ditions of propagation, a kind of inevitable, first-stage vir- 
tue is instituted; such as mitigates the severities of sin, 
softens the sentiments to a social, tender play, and offers 
to the mind a type, every where present, of the beauty and 
true Joy of a disinterested, spiritual benevolence, They 
compose, instead, a burly prison-gang of probationers, 
linked together by no ties of consanguinity, reflecting no 
traces of family likeness, bent to each other’s and God’s 
love by no dear memories. Society there is none. Law 
is Impossible. Society and law Suppose conditions of or- 
ganic unity already prepared. Every man for himself, is 
the grand maxim of life; for all are atoms together, in the 
medley of the common selfishness; only the old atoms 
have an immense advantage over the young ones fresh ar- 
rived; for these new comers of probation, come of course 
to the prey, having no guardians or protectors, and no 
tender sentiments of care and kindred prepared to shelter 


a a 


* Chapter IV, p. 111. 


IN SOCIETY. 181 


them and smooth their way. Besides, the world into” 
which they come must have been already fouled and dis-_ 
ordered by the sin of the prior populations, and must 
therefore be a frame of being, wholly inappropriate to their 
new-created innocence; or else, if not thus disordered, 
must have been a casement of iron, too rigid and impas- 
sive to receive any injury from sin, and therefore Incapa- 
ble of any retributive discipline returned upon it. There 
is, in short, no condition of trial which, after all, 1s seen to 
be so utterly forbidding and hopeless as just this state of 
Adamic innocence, independence, and maturity of faculty, 
which many are so ready to require of God, as the only 
method of promise and fair advantage, in the beginning 
of a responsible life. 

How different the condition realized where men are 
propagated as a race or races. Then are they linked to- 
gether by a necessary, constituent, anticipative love, 
Moved by this love, the progenitors are immediately set to 
a work of care and benefaction, beautifully opposite to the | 
proper selfishness of their sin. The delicate and tender 
being received to their embrace, circulates their blood, 
will bear their name, and is looked upon, even by theia 
selfishness, as a multiplied and dearer self. They are even’ 
made to feel, in a lower and more rudimental way, what 
joy there is in a disinterested love; and they pour out 
their fondness, in ways that even try their invention, insti- 
gated by the compulsory bliss of sacrifice. They want 
the best things too’for their child, even his virtue; and 
probably enough his religious virtue; for they dread the 
bitter woes of wrong-doing. This is true, at least, of all 
but such as have fallen below nature in their vices, and 


ceased to hear her yoice. They even undertake to he a 
16 


182 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


providence, and do for their child all which the love of 
God, even till now rejected, has been seeking to do for 
themselves; commanding him away from wrong, and 
warning him faithfully of its dangers. Besides it is a 
great point, in the scheme of propagated life, that the child 
learns how to be grown, so to speak, into, and exist in, 
another will; which is an immense advantage to the relig- 
jous nurture, even where the parental character is not 
good. He is not like a population of untutored, unregu- 
lated Adams, who have just come to the finding of a man’s 
will in them, and do not know how to use it, least of all 
now to sink it obediently in the sovereign will and author- 
ityof God. The child’s will grew in authority, and he comes 
out gently, in the reverence of a subordinated habit, to_ 
choose the way of obedience, having his religious con- 
science configured and trained, by a kind of family con- 
science, previously developed. There is almost no family 
therefore—none except the very worst and most de-  , 
praved—in which the rule of the house is not a. great 
spiritual benefit, and a means even of religious virtue. 
How much more, where the odor of a heavenly piety fills — 
the house and sanctifies the atmosphere of life itself. In- 
stead of being set forth as an overgrown man, issued from 

the Creator’s hand to make the tremendous choice, undi- 
rected by experience, he is gently inducted, as it were, by 
choices of parents before his own, into the habit and ~ 

‘ accepted practice of all holy obedience; growing up in the 
nurture of their grace, as truly as of their natural affec- 
tion. Furthermore, as corruption or depravation is propa: 
gated, under well-known laws of physiology, what are we 
to think but that a regenerate life may be also propaga- 
tel; and that so the scripture truth of a sanctification 


IN SOCIETY. 183 


from the womb may sometime cease to be a thing remark- 
able and become a commonly expected fact? And then, 
if a point should finally be reached, under the sulnime 
palingenesia of redemption, when christian faith, together 
with its fruits of nurture and sanctified propagation, should 
be nearly or quite universal, and the world, which is now 
in its infancy, should roll on, millions of ages after, train- 
ing its immense populations for the skies, how magnificent- 
ly preponderant the advantages of the plan of propagation, 
which at first we thought could be only a plan to set us 
out in the wrong, and sacrifice our virtue by anticipation. 

This comparison, which might otherwise seem to be a 
digression, wil! effectually remove those false impressions 
so generally prevalent concerning God’s equity in the fact 
of natural corruption; and if this be done, a chief impedi- 
ment to all right conceptions of the human state, as affect- 
ed by sin, will be removed. In this manner, wholly apart 
from the scriptures, instructed only by the laws of physi- 
ology, we discover the certain truth of an organic fall or 
social Japse in the race; we find humanity broken, disor- 
dered, plunged into unnature by sin; but dark and fearful 
as the state may be, there is nothing in it unhopeful, noth- 
ing to accuse. We are only where we should be, each by 
his own act, if we were created independently; with im- 
mense advantages added to mitigate the hopelessness of 
our disorder. 

It is very true that, under these physiological terms of 
propagation, society falls or goes down as a unit, and evil 
becomes, in a sense, organic in the earth. The bad in- 
heritance passes, and fears, frauds, crimes against property, 
eharacter and life, abuses of power, oppressions of the 
weak, persecutions of the good, piracies, wars of revolt, and 


184 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


wars of conquest, are the staple of the world’s bitter histo 
ry. .All that Mr. Fourier has said of society, in its practi: 
cal operation, is true; it is a pitiless and dreadful power, 
as fallen society should be. And yet it is a condition of 
existence far less dreadful than it would be, if the organic 
force of natural affinities and affections were not operative 
still, in the desolations of evil, tv produce institutions, con- 
struct nations,* and establish a condition of qualified 
unity and protection. Otherwise, or existing only as 
Separate units, in no terms of consanguinity, we should, 
probably, fall into a state of utter non-organization, or, 
what is the same, of universal prey. The grand woe of 
society, therefore, is not, as this new prophet of science 
teaches, the bad organization of society; but that good or- 
ganization, originally beautiful and beneficent, can only 
mitigate, but can not shut away, the evils by which it is 
infested. The line of propagation is, in one view, the line 
of transmission by which evil passes: but it is, at the same 
time, a sure spring of solidarity and organific power, by 
which all the principal checks and mitigations of evil, 
save those which are brought in with the grace of super- 
natural redemption, are supplied. Otherwise the state of 
evil, untransmitted and purely original in all, would make 
a hell of anarchy, unendurable and final. 

Nothing, in this view, could be more superficial than 
Mr. Fourier’s conception of the woes of society. Ignoring, 
at the outset, the existence of sin, and assuming that every 
_ man comes from the hand of his Maker in a state that 
represents the Maker's integrity, even as the stars do, he 
lays it down as a fundamental maxim of science, that all 


*The word itself represents vyon its face the common life of a common 


root, or parentage. 


IN SOCIETY. 185 


the passions and appetites of the race are like yravity 
itself, instincts that reach after order—in his own rather 
pretentious and extra scientific language, that “attractions 
are proportioned to destinies.” The attractions of the 
worlds of matter adjust their positions; so the perfect 
order of the heavens. So the attractions of men, to 
wit, their lusts, appetites, passions, will adjust the perfect 
order of society. Why, then, do they not? Because of 
social mal-organization. And, with so many impulses 
or passions gravitating all toward order, whence came the 
mal-organization?—why are not the heavens, too, mal- 
organized, and with as good right? But I refer to these 
insane theories of social science, not for any purpose of 
argument against them, but simply to get light and shade 
for my subject. The woe of society is deeper and more 
difficult; not to be mended by artificial reconstructions 
apart from all ties of consanguinity, not by contracts of 
good will and mutual service, not by bonds of interest and 
licenses of passion. It lies, first of all, in the fall of man 
nimself, which includes the fall of passion; a fall which is 
mitigated even compulsorily by the organific power of 
consanguinity, but can, by no human wisdom, or skill, or 
combination, be restored. Organization will do what it 
ean, it will be more or less bad as it is more or less per- 
verted by injustice, or misdirected and baffled by the 
instigations of selfishness and the bad affinities and de 
monized passions of sin. 


_ Tt now remains to carry our inquest one step farther. 
If sin has power, taken as a dynamic, to affect the soul, 
the body, and society, in the manner already indicated, 


reducing all these departments of nature to a state un- 
16* 


waa Bel oA ae 


186 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


natural, it should not be incredible that it may also have 
power to produce a like disorder in the material or physi- 
cal world. T’he immense power of the human will over * 
the physical substances of the world and the conjunctions 
of its causes, is seldom adequately conceived. Almost 
every thing, up to the moon, is capable of being some- 
how varied or affected by it. Being a force supernatural, 
it is continually playing itself into the chemistries and 
external combinations of matter, converting shapes, re- 
ducing or increasing quantities, transferring positions, 
‘raming and dismembering conjunctions, turning poisons. 
into medicines, and reducing fruits to poisons, till at 
Jength scarcely any thing is left in its properly natural 
state. Some of these changes, which it is the toil of 
human life to produce, are beneficent; and a multitude of 
others represent, alas! too faithfully, the prime distinction 
of sin; the acting of a power against God, or as it was not 
made to act. Could we only bring together into a com- 
plete inventory all the new structures, compositions, in- 
ventions, shapes, qualities, already produced by man, 
which are, in fact, the furniture only of his sin—means of 
self-indulgence, instruments of violence, shows of pride, 
instigations of appetite, incitements and institutes of cor- 
rupt pleasure—all the leprosies and leper-houses of vice, the 
prisons of oppression, the hospitals and battle fields of 
war, we should see a face put on the -world which God 
never gave it, and which only represents the bad conver- 
sion it has suffered, under the immense and ever-indus- 
trious perversities of sin. 
But we must carry our search to a point that is deeper 
and more significant. In what is called nature, we find 
a large admixture of signs or objects, which certainly do 


™N THE NATURAL WORLD. 187 


not belong tv an ideal state of beauty, and do not, there: 
fore, represent the mind of God, whence they are supposed 
to come. The fact is patent every where, and yet the 
superficial and hasty multitudes appear to take it for 
granted, that all the creations of God are beautiful of 
course. ‘T’hey either assume it as a necessary point ot 
reverence, or deduce it as a point of reason, that whatever 
comes from God represents the thought of God; being 
cast in the mold of his thought, which is divine beauty 
itself. Not only do the poets and poctasters in prose goa 
the round of nature, sentimentalizing among her dews and 
flowers, and paying their worship at her shrine, as if the 
world were a gospel even of beauty; but our philosophers 
often teach it as a first principle, and our natural theolo- 
gians assume it also in their arguments, that the forms of 
things must represent the perfect forms of the Divine 
thought, by which they were fashioned. It would seem 
that such a conceit might be dissipated by a single glance 
of revision; for God is the infinite beauty, and who can 
imagine, looking on this or that half dry and prosy scene 
of nature, that it represents the infinite beauty? The fact 
of creation argues no such thing. For what if it should 
happen to have been a part of God’s design in the work to 
represent, not himself only as the pure and Perfect One, 
the immutable throne of law and universal order, but 
quite as truly, and in immediate proximity, to represent 
man to himself; that he may see both what he is for, and 
whit he is, and struggle up out of one into the other. 
Then, or in that view, it would be the perfection of the 
world, taken in its moral adaptations, that it is not perfect, 
and does not answer to the beauty of the creative mind, 
save under the large qualification specitied. 


188 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


And exactly this appears to be the true conception of 
the physical world. What does it mean, for example, that 
the vital organizations are continually seen to be attempt- 
ing products which they can not finish? Thus a fruit 
tree covers itself with an immense profusion of blos.— 
soms, that drop, and do not set in fruit. And then, of 
those fruits which are set, an immense number fall, strew- 
ing the ground with deaths—tokens all of an abortive at 
tempt in nature, if we call it nature, to execute more than 
she can finish. And this we see in all the growths of the 
world—they lay out more than they can perform. Is this 
the ideal perfection of nature, or is there some touch of 
unnature and disorder in it? Is God, the Creator, repre- 
sented in this? Does he put himself before us in this 
manner, as a being who attempts more fruits than he can 
produce? or is there a hint in it, for man, of what may come 
to pass in himself? an image under which he may conceive 
himself and fitly represent himself in language? a token, 
also, and proof of that most real abortion, to which he may 
bring even his immortal nature, despite of all the saving 
mercies of God? 

Swedenborg and his followers have a way of represent: 
ing, I believe, that God creates the world through man, 
by which they understand that what we call the creation, 
is a purely gerundive matter—God’s perpetual act-—and 
that he holds the work to man, at every stage, so ag 
to represent him always at his present point, and act upon 
him fitly to his present taste. Not far off is Jonathan 
Kidward’s conception of God’s upholding of the universe— 
it is in fact a perpetual reproduction; the creation, so called, 
being to His person, what the image in a mirror is to the 
person before it, from whom it proceeds and by whom it 


t 


IN THE NATURAL WORLD. 189 


is sustained. Indeed this i1atter conception runs into the 
other, and becomes identical with it, as soon as we take im 
the fact, that God is always being and becoming to man, 
both in counsel and feeling, what is most exactly fit te 
man’s character and want; for, in that view, God’s image, 
otherwise called his creation, will be all the while receiv: 
ing a color from man, and will so far be configured to him. 
Accordingly, we look, in either view, to see the Kosmos o1 
outward frame of things held to man, linked to his for- 
mines to rise and fall with him, and so, under certain 
limitations, to give him back his doings and represent him 
to himself—representing God, in fact, the more adequately 
that it does. | 

The doctrine of types in the physical world, to represent 
conditions of character and changes of fortune in the 
spiritual, is only another conception of the same gen- 
eral truth. And this doctrine of types we know to be 
true in part; for language itself is possible only in virtue 
of the fact that physical types are provided, as bases of 
words, having each a natural fitness to represent some 
spiritual truth of human life; which is in fact the princi 
pal use and significance of language. Whence also it 
follows that if human life is disordered, perverted, re- 
duced to a condition of unnature by sin, there must also 
be provided, as the necessary condition of language, types 
that represent so great a change; which is equivalent to 
saying that the fortunes of the outer world must, to some 
very great extent, follow the fortunes of the occupant and 
groan with him in his disorders. 

Or we are brought to a conclusion essentially the same, 
by considéring the complete and perfect unity of Latural 
causes; how they form a dynaxaic whole, resting in an ex- 


190 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


act balance of 1nutual relationship, so that if any world, 
or particle, starts from its orbit, cr posimon, every other 
world and particle feels the change. What then must fol- 
low when the given force or substance, man, begins and 
for long ages continues to act as he was not made 
to act; out of character, against God, refusing place, and 
breaking out on every side from the general scheme of 
unity and harmony, in which the creation was to be com- 
prehended? What can his human disorder be, but a prop- 
agating cause of disorder? what his deformity within, but 
a soul of deformity without, in the surroundings of tie 
field he occupies? 

And this again is but another version of the fact that 
the final causes of things are moral; the arrangement. be- 
ing that natural causes shall react upon all wrong-doing, 
in retributive diseases, discords, and pains, to correct and 
chasten the wrong; which, indeed, is the same thing’ as to 
say that the world was made to share the fortunes of man, 
and fali with him in his fall. 

Whichever of these views we take, for at bottom they 
all coalesce in the same conclusion, we see, at a glance, 
that, given the fact of sin, what we call nature can be no 
mere embodiment of God’s beauty and the eternal order 
of His mind, but must be, to some wide extent, a realm of 
deformity and abortion; groaning with the discords of sin 
und keeping company with it in the guilty pains of its 
apostasy. Hiven as the apostle says, meaning doubtless 
all which his words most naturally signify—‘TFor the 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together.” 

We need not therefore scruple to allow and also to main- 
tain the judgment, that many things we meet are not beau: 
tiful; we should rathcr look for many that are not. Thus 


we a 


IN THE NATURAL WORLD. 191 


we have growths in the briars and thorns that do not rep: 
resent the beauty and benignity of God; but under his 
appointment take on their spiny ferocity from man, whose 
surroundings they are, and whose fortunes they are made 
to participate. The same may be said of loathsome and 
disgusting animals. Or we may take the pismire race for 
an example—a race of military vermin, who fight pitched 
battles and sometimes make slaves of their captives; rep- 
resenting nothing surely in God, save his purpose to re- 
flect, in keeriest mockery, the warlike chivalry and glory 
of man. It was our fortune once to see a battle of these 
insect heroes. On a square rod of ground it raged for two 
whole days, a braver field than Marathon, or Waterloo, 
covered with the dead and dying, and with fierce enemies 
rolled in the dust, still fighting on in a deadly grapple of 
halves, after the slender connection of their middle part - 
had been completely severed in the encounter. That these 
creatures image God in their fight, can not be supposed, 
save as God may reveal, by a figure so powerful, the 
sense he has of what we call our glory, the bloody glory 
of our sin. 

Under the same principle that the world is linked to 
man and required to represent him to himself, we are 
probably to account for the many and wide-spread to- 
kens of deformity round us in the visible objects of 
nature. Whoever may once set his thought to this kind 
of inquiry, will be amazed by the constant recurrence of. 
deformities, or things which lack the beauties of form. 
After all the fine sentimentalities, lavished by rote and 
without discriminating thought on the works and pro- 
cesses of nature, he will be surprised to find that the world 
is not as truly a realm of beauty, as of beauty flecked by 


192 CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, 


injury. The growths are carbuncled and discused, and 
the children have it for a play to fetch a perfect leaf 
Fogs and storms blur the glory of the sky, and foul days, 


rightly so called, interspace the bright and fair. The earth - 


itself displays vast deserts swept by the horrid simsom; 
muddy rivers, with their fenny shores, tenanted by hide: 
ous alligators; swamps and morasses, spreading out in 
provinces of quagmire, and reeking in the steam of death. 
In the kingdom of life, disgusting and loathsome objects 
appear, too numerous to be recounted; such as worms and 
the myriads of base vermin, deformed animals, dwarfs, 
idiots, leprosies, and the rot of cities swept by the plague; 
history itself depicting the mushrooms sprouting in the 
bodies of the unburied dead, and the jackals howling in 
the chambers, at their dreadful repast. Even more sig: 
nificant still is the fact, because it is a fact that concerns 
the honor even of our personal organism, that no living 
man or woman is ever found to be a faultless model of 
beauty and proportion. When the sculptor will fashion 
a perfect form, he is obliged to glean for it, picking out 
the several parts of beauty from a hundred mal-propor- 
tioned, blemished bodies in actual life. And what is yet 
more striking, full three-fourths of the living races of men 
are so ugly, or so far divested of beauty in their mold, 
that no sculptor would ever think of drawing on them for 
a single feature! 

This word deformity, which is properly a word of sight, 
may be used too in its largest and most inclusive import, 
to cover all the ground of the senses, together with a whole 
family of words in de or dis, that indicate a relation of dis- 
junction—the dis-gusts of the taste and the smell; the dis- 
easement, or pain of the sensibility; the dis-cords and the 


IN THE NATURAL WORLD. © 15 


unmelodious notes that storm the offended ear of music— 
the manifold braying, cawing, screeching, yelling sounds, 
such as would be low in a farce, but are issued still from 
.as many badly-voiced pipes in the great organ of nature, 
And then besides we have dis-tempers, dis-proportions, dis- 
t.rtions, dis-orders, de-rangements, answering all, shall we 
say, to the dis-location of our inward harmony, and, reveal- 
ing in that manner the desolating effects of our sin. 

If it should be urged that all these deformities and dis- 
cords are necessary contrasts, to enliven the beauty and 
highten the music of nature, it is enough to answer that 
pain is as necessary to joy, eternal pain to eternal joy; or 
better still, because the analogy is closer and more exact, 
that moral deformity is just as necessary in God to the suffi 
cient impression of His moral beauty. Though, if we 
take them all together in their moral import and uses— 
the abortions, the deformed growths and landscapes, anu 
the strange jargon of sounds—regarding them as prepare. 
by the Almighty Father, fitly to insphere a creature super- 
natural whom he is correcting in his sins and training 
unto Himself, then do they rise into real dignity and reveal 
a truly divine magnificence. This, we say, is indeed the 
tremendous beauty of God; and the strange, wild jargon 
of the world, shattered thus by sin, becomes to us a mys- 
terious, transcendent hymn. Still it is deformity, jargon, 
death, and the only winning side of it is, that it answers 
to the woe, and meets the want of our sin. 

17 


CHAPTER VII. 
ANTICIPATIVE CONSEQUENCES 


In the account offered of the consequences of sin, wé 
have spoken of thes@ consequences as effects transpiring 
under laws, and so as matters post in respect tu the fact of 
sin. The result stated coincides, in all but the positive or 
inflictive form, with the original curse denounced on man’s 
apostasy, as represented in the Adamic history or sin- 
myth, as some would call it, of the ancient scriptures. 
That primal curse, it is conceived, penetrates the very 
ground as a doom of sterility, covers it with thorns and 
thistles and all manner of weeds to be subdued by labor, 
makes it weariness to live, brings in death with its armies 
of pains and terrors to hunt us out of life, and so unpara- 
dises the world. Call it then a myth, disallow the notion 
of a positive infliction as being unphilosophical; still the 
inatter of the change, or general world-lapse asserted in it, 
is one of the grandest, most massive, best-attested truths 
included in human knowledge. It is just that which 
ought to be true, under the conditions, and which we have 
found, by inspection also, to be true as a matter of fact. 

Still there is a difficulty, or a great and hitherto insuffi- 
ciently explored question, that remains. It is the question 
of date or time; for when we speak, as in the previous 
chapter, of the consequences of sin, we seem to imply that. 
upon, or after the fact of sin, the physical order of the 
world, affected by the shock, underwent a great change 
that amounted to a fall; becoming, from that point on- 
ward, a realm of deformity and discord, as before it was 


TWO KINDS OF CONSEQUENCES, 195 


ot, and displaying, in ali its sceneries and combinations 
the tokens of a broken constitution. All which, it wils 
readily occur to any one, can not, in that form, be true, 
For the sturdy facts of science rise up to confront us in 
such representations, testifying that death, and prey, and 
deformed objects, and hideous monsters, were in the world 
long before the arrival of man. Nay, the rocks open their 
tombs and show us that older curses than the curse, older 
consequences ante-dating sin, had already set their marks 
on the world and had even made it, more than once, an 
Aceldama of the living races. 

“T need scarce say,” remarks Hugh Miller, “that the 
paleontologist finds no trace in nature of that golden age 
of the world, of which the poets delighted to sing, when 
all creatures lived together in unbroken peace, and war and 
bloodshed were unknown. Ever since animal life began 
upon our planet, there have existed, in all the departments 
of being, carnivorous classes, who could not live but by 
the death of their neighbors; and who were armed, in con- 
sequence, for their destruction, like the butcher with his 
knife and the angler with his hook and spear.”* This being 
true, the paradisaic history, as commonly understood, is still 
farther off from a possible verification, unless we suppose the 
curse to be there reported as a fact subsequent, though 
Jatently incorporate before, because it is there discovered, 
and plainly could not be conceived, at that time, as the 
facts of future science may require. 

For the true solution of this apparent collision between 
geologic revelations and the paradisaic history, lies in the 
fact which many have not considered, that there are two 
modes of consequence, or two kinds of consequences; those 


a — 


* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 99. 


196 WHAT EVIL CONSEQUENCES 


which come as effects under physical causes, and have 
their time as events subsequent; and those which co1ne 
anticipatively, or before the facts whose consequences they 
are, because of intellectual conditions, or because intelli 
gence, affected by such facts, apprehended before the 
time, could not act as being ignorant of them. These two 
modes of consequenee, and particularly the latter, now 
demand our attention. 


As regards the former—the consequences of suffering 
and dislocation that follow sin, as effects in time subse- 
quent—there is happily not much requiring to be said; for 
the truth on that subject is familiar, and is in fact over- 
much insisted on by the modern teachers. Only it hap- 
pens that, while they so frequently make a gospel of the 
mere retributive principle thus arrayed against evil, they 
do also contrive to narrow the bad consequences of sin tc 
a range so restricted, and to results of mischief so nearly 
trivial, that really nothing is involved in disobedience, ex- 
cept in cases of extreme viciousness and moral abandon- 
ment. They do not conceive such a thing as the real dis: 
solution of the primal order and harmony even of the 
soul, and the ceasing to be any longer a complete integer, 
when it drops its moral integrity. What I have so 
abundantly shown in the previous chapter, they do not 
allow themseives to see—that any beginning, or outbreak 
of sin carries with it the imevitable fact of a shock to the 
_ general state of order; starting trains of penal and retri- 
butive consequences, which have no assignable limit, and 
which none but a supernatural and divine agency can re- 
verse. Any thing entering into God’s world, or falling 
out in it, that is against his will, breaks of course the 


ARE SUBSEQUENT IN TIME. 197 


crystalline order, and how far the fracture will go no one 
can tell. 

When, therefore, we meet any given token of lapse, or 
disorder, it may not be clear to us, on mere inspection, 
how it came in, whether among the subsequent or the an- 
ticipative consequences of sin. Thorns and thistles—did 
they take on their spiny and savage armor before the sin 
of man, or after? Possibly after. No man can tell be- 
forehand how far such a beginning of disobedience aud 
apostasy from God might penetrate the fabric, and poison 
the substance, and so determine the form of growths in the 
world; for, in a scheme of perfect reason, any violation of 
wrong travels fast and far, and no one can guess how far. 
But if the geologist, opening the hidden registers of the 
world finds, the portrait, or even the indisputable analogon 
of a thistle in the stone, that is the end of the inquiry. 

The substance then of what I would desire to say on 
this particular point is that, without some conviction of 
evil and pain following after sin as its necessary effect, 
there could be no such thing as a practically real moral 
government in the world. That such evil and pain do 
follow, with inevitable certainty, even as all effects follow 
after their causes, we perceive and almost universally ad- 
mit; for they are distinguishable in all the four great de- 
partments of being—the body, the soul, society, and the 
world. And since it is theoretically true that, in any per- 
fect system of being, the disturbance of a particle disturbs 
the whole, we are to admit, without difficulty, and as it were 
by intellectual requirement, that evils most remote, decp- 
est, widest, and most comprehensive, may be effects, or in- 
evilable sequents of human transgression. On this point 


our faith should properly be shocked by nothing; for it ig 
Migs 


198 | PRE-EXISTING EVILS, HOW FAR 


a fact visible beforehand, all time apart, that sin must 
be a grand, all-penetrating sacrament of woe to the world 
that contains it. And we shal! most naturally take all 
the evils we meet to be the dynamical effects of sin, till we 
find them penetrating aiso the pre-Adamite conditions of 
being, and setting their type in the registers of the geo- 
logic ages. 


We come now to the matter of the anticipative conse- 
quences; where it will be required of us to speak more 
carefully and to dwell longer. 

And here the first thing to be noted, as respects the 
consequences of sin in our particular world, is that the 
subsequent effects of the sin of other beings might very 
well bring in disorders here that anticipate the arrival of 
man. ‘There had been other moral beings in existence 
doubtless before the creation of man. So, in fact, the 
scriptures themselves testify. They also testify that some 
such were evil and, as we are left to judge, fixed in a 
reprobate character, by long courses of evil. As they are 
shown to have had access to our world, after we came in 
as a race to possess it, so doubtless they had been visitors 
and travelers in it, if we may so speak, during all the long 
geologic eras that preceded our coming—hovering it may 
be in the smoke and steam, or watching for congenial 
sounds and sights among the crashing masses and grind- 
ing layers, even before the hige monsters began to wallow 
in the ooze of the waters, or the giant birds to stalk 
along the hardening shores. What they did, in this or 
that geologic layer of the world, we of course know not. 
As little do we know in what numbers they appeared, or 
by what deeds of violence and wrong they disfigured the 


REFERRIBLE TO OLDER POPULATIONS, 199 


existing order. We do not even know that the sue: 
cessive extinctions of so many animal races, and the 
deformities found in so many of the now existing races, 
were not somehow referrible to the audacity of their 
wrongs and the bitter woe of their iniquities. As already 
intimated,* the fencing of spirits may be an essentially 
moral affair—such that having, by their very nature, the 
freedom originally of the physical universe, the universe 
might well be visited by all such myrmidons 6f evil and, 
being so visited, might show, as a necessary consequence, 
the tokens of their evil contact or inhabitation. Indeed it 
might well enough show such tokens of their sin in worlds 
they had never visited; for the universe, as we have seen, 
is a whole, and a shock to any part of that whole must 
have its effects of some kind, in every other. How far 
the solidarity of the universe and its fortunes extends, or 
how many things it embraces, we certainly do not know, 
and are therefore not qualified to assume that “the whole 
creation” does not necessarily feel the touch of every 
bad mind and act, and suffer some consequent disorder 
in every part. Finding then tokens of deformity and 
prey, and objects of disgust appearing in the world, long 
ages before it was inhabited by man, we are not hastily to 
infer that these are not actual consequences of sin. They 
may be such, in the strictest terms of retributive causality, 
though not as related to the sins of man. Preceding that, 
by long ages of time, they may yet be subsequent and pe- 
nal effects, as related to older, vaster, outlying populations 
of sinners that had visited. or sent the shock of their sin 
into the world, before the human race appeared. 

It is not proposed, however, to account for all the pre 


——____ ._. -_.. 


* Chapter [V., pp. 123-128. 


200 CONSEQUENCES PREVIOUS, 


viously existing marks of evil in the world, in ihis manner. 
It is most agreeable not to do it. For we shall easily con- 
vince ourselves that vast realms of consequences, and 
these as real as any, precede and, in rational order, ought 
to precede, their grounds, or occasions. Indeed it i¢ 
the peculiar distinction of consequences mediated by in- 
telligence, that they generaily go before, and prepare the 
coming of events to which they relate. Whoever plants 
a state erects a prison, or makes the prison to be a neces- 
sary part of his plan; which prison, though it be erected 
before any case of felony occurs, is just as truly a conse- 
quence of the felonies to be, as if it were erected afterward, 
or were a natural result of such felonies. All the machin- 
ery of discipline in a school, or an army, is prepared by 
intelligence, perceiving beforehand the certain want of 
discipline hereafter to appear, and is just as truly a conse- 
quence of the want, as if it were created by the want 
itself, without any mediation of intelligence. 

So also any commander, who is managing a campaign, 
and has gotten hold of the intended plan of his enemy, 
will be utterly unable to project a plan for himself, or even 
to order-the manceuvers of a day, so as not to show a look- 
ing at the secret he has gained, and also to prepare in- 
numerable things, that are, in some sense, consequences 
of it. What then shall we look for, since God’s whole 
plan of government is, in some highest view, a campaign 
against sin, and is from the beginning projected as such, 
but that all the turnings of his counsels and shapings of 
his creations, should have some discoverable reference to 
it? And how, in that case, could they be more truly and 
rigidly consequences of it? Indeed all consequences post, 
are, in fact, anticipative first, and are, as really existent, in 


ee a 


MEDIATED BY INTELLIGENCER. 201 


tho laws ordained by intelligence to bring them to pass, as 
they are in their actual occurrence in time, afterward. It 
is by no fiction therefore, and as little by any fetch of 
ingenuity, that we speak of anticipative consequences; for 
they are the unfailing distinction of every plan ordered 
by intelligence; every system or scheme, comprehended 
in the molds of reason, will disclose, in the remotest and 
most subtle beginnings, marks that relate to events future, 
and even to issues most remote. 

This too, so far from being any subject of wonder, is 
even a kind of necessary incident of intelligence. For 
every thing that comes into the view of intelligence, must 
also pass into the plans of intelligence. How can any in- 
telligent being frame a plan, so as to make no account of 
what is really in his knowledge? Or how could the all- 
knowing God arrange a scheme of providential order, just 
as if he did not know the coming fact of sin, eternally 
present to his knowledge? Mind works under conditions 
of unity, and, above all, Perfect Mind. What God has 
eternally in view, therefore, as the certain fact of sin, that 
fact about which all highest counsel in his government 
must revolve, and upon the due management of which all 
most eventful and beneficent issues in his kingdom depend, 
must pervade his most ancient beginnings and crop out 
in all the layers and eras of his process, from the first 
chapter of creative movement, onward. As certainly as 
sin is to be encountered in his plan, its marks and conse- 
quences will be appearing anticipatively, and all the grand 
arrangements and cycles of time will be somehow prelud- | 
ing its approach, and the dire encounter to be maintained 
with it. To create and govern a world, through long eras 
of time, and great physical revulsions, yet never discover 


202 PREMEDITATION OF GOD, 


to our view any token that he apprehends the erand cata. 
clysm of sia that is approaching, till after the fact is come, 
he must be much less than a wise, all-perceiving Mind. 
Much room would be left for the doubt, whether he is any 
mind at all; for it is the way of mind to weave all coun- 
se] and order into a web of visible unity. 

It accords also with this general view of the subject, as 
related to mind, that our most qualified teachers in science 
discover so many tokens of premeditation, or anticipative 
thought, in the earlier types and creations of the world. 
‘Premeditation prior to creation”*—this is the grand, 
intellectual fact which Mr. Agassiz verifies with a con-~ 
fidence so calmly scientific, in his late introduction to the 
study of Natural History. All sciences, he shows, are 
in things because the creator’s premeditative thought is 
there; every first thing accordingly shows some premedit- 
ative token of every last. ‘‘Hnough has been already 
said,” he remarks, “to show that the leading thought 
which runs through the successions of all organized 
beings, in past ages, is manifested again in new combina- 
tions, in the phases of the development of living repre- 
sentatives of these different types. It exhibits every 
where the working of the same creative Mind, through all 
time, and upon the whole surface of the globe.”+ He 
passes directly on, accordingly, in his next section, te 
speak of the “ Prophetic Types among Animals,” discov- 
cring, in the earlier types of animated being, what reads 
‘like a prophecy” of all the types to come after. ‘There 
are entire families,” he says, ‘among the representatives 
of older periods, of nearly every class of animals, which, 
in the state of their perfect development, exemplify such 


Es 


* Essay on Classification, p. 9. t Ib., p. 116 


DISCOVERED IN THE FACTS OF SCIENCE; 208 


prophetic relations, and afford, within the limits of the 
animal kingdom, at least, the most unexpected evidence 
that the plan of the whole creation had been maturely 
considered, long before it was executed.”* All this, 1t will 
be observed, by the mere dry light of reason and of posi- 
tive science, apart from any consideration of a service to 
be rendered to revealed religion. 

Prof. Dana, in like manner, though with a somewhat dif- 
ferent purpose, observes, in “ the survey of geological facts, 
a remarkable oneness of system, binding together, in a 
single plan or scheme, the successive events or creations, 
from the earliest coral or shell-fish to man.” + The whole 
geologic series or progress constitutes, in this manner, he 
maintains, ‘One grand history, with the creation of man, 
the last act in the drama of creation.” 

The point of conviction reached by these great masters 
of science, and stated thus in terms of the truest intellec- 
tual insight, is still not the end of all reason as pertaining 
to the subject in question. If we speak of ‘ prophetic 
types” fulfilled or perfected by future creations, there will, 
in the same manner, be types also that have their fulfill- 
ment after all creations are ended; in the spiritual state of 
men, and the remotest issues and last ends of human exist- 
ence. And as all that God ordains or previously creates, 
will have some respect to these last ends, and the condi- 
tions of trial and bad experience through which they are 
to be reached, it is even probable that, if we had a perfect 
insight of any humblest thing, be it only a mollusc, or an 
insect, we should find some subtle type or reference in it, 
‘o the grandest and most radical facts of the spiritual his- 
tory of the universe. For the premeditation of God and 


% Essay on Classification p 117. + New Englander, Vol. XVL., p. 96. 


204 ) WHICH PREMEDITATION 


the intellectual unity of his thought comprehend imcre 
than any rere matter of species, or frame of geological 
order; viz., that for which all species and all facts of 
science and all objects of scientific study exist. 

So also, if we speak with Prof. Dana of a “remarkable 
or.eness of system,” geology is, in real fact, no system of 
God, except as we say it by accommodation, which doubt- 
less he would also admit; for there is but one system and 
can be only one, as there is but one systematizing mind, 
and one last end, about which the inferior combinations, 
sometimes called systems, revolve. When, therefore, it is 
remarked that God’s one system visibly comprehends all the 
creation, from coral and shell-fish up to man, why not also, 
we ask, to something farther?—to what man will do, and 
what will be done upon him and for him, and finally to all 
that he will become, when God’s last end, that in which 
all system centers, and for which it works, is finally con- 
summated? And what can we look for, in this view, but 
that God’s premeditations about sin, the images it raises, 
the counsel it requires, the deaths and abortions it works, 
and the new-creations it necessitates, will be coming inte 
view, in all the immense, ante-dated eras and mighty revo- 
lutions of the geologic process? By the mere unity of 
God’s intellectual system, they ought to appear, and, when 
they do, they will as truly be consequences of sin as if 
they were mere physical effects, subsequent in time to the 
facts. 

_ There is also another account to be made of these an- 
ticipative consequences of sin; viz., that they are neces- 
sary for great and important uses, in the economy of life, 
as a spiritual concern. Were there no tokers of death, 
deformity, prey, and abortion in the geologic eras, previ- 


IS UNIVERSAL. 208 


ous to man’s arrival, and were it left us to believe that j ust 
then and there discord broke loose, and the whole frame 
of paradisaic order was shaken to the fall, we might im- 
azine that God was overtaken by some shock for which 
ye was not prepared, and that the world fell out of his 
hands by some oversight, which probably enough he can 
never effectually repair. But with so many tokens of an- 
ticipative recognition found laboring, and heard groaning, 
through so many eras of deaths and hard convulsions, prior 
to the sin they represent, we see, every one of us, in our 
state of wrong-doing and denial of God, that He under- 
stands his work from the beginning, is taken by no sur- 
prise, meets no shock for which He is unprepared, and 
holds every part of his kingdom, even from the founda- 
tion of the world, in fit connection with the tragic history 
of sin and salvation afterward to be transacted in it. In 
part, we see the world reduced to unnature, infected 
with disease, shaken by discord, marred by deformity, 
subsequently to the fact of sin, just as it must be by the 
retributive action of causes, or by the false conjunctions 
produced by the wrongs and abuses of sin. For the rest, 
it was anticipatively disordered for the sake of order, or 
in terms of necessary unity and counsel, as pertaining to 
the Governing Mind; displaying thus, in clearer and 
diviner evidence, the eternal insight and all-comprenend- 
ing intelligence of His appointments. For, in being set 
with types all through and from times most ancient, of 
suffering and deformity, prefiguring, in that manner, the 
being whose sublime struggles are to have it for their field, 
and showing him, when he arrives, how Eternal Fore- 
thought has been always shaping it to the mold of his 


fortunes—thus and thus only could he be fitly assured, in 
18 


206 GEOLOGIC TYPES 


the wild chaos of sin, of any such Counsel, or Power, as 
ean bring him safely through. | 

Iicw magnificent also is the whole course of geology, or 
the geologic eras and changes, taken as related to the fu- 
ture great catastrophe of man, and the new-creating, super- 
natural grace of his redemption. It is as if, standing on 
some high summit,.we could see the great primordial 
world rolling down through gulfs and fiery cataclysms, 
where all the living races die; thence to emerge, again and 
again, when the Almighty fiat calls it forth, a new crea- 
tion, covered with fresh populations; passing thus, through 
a kind of geologic eternity, in so many chapters of deaths, 
and of darting, frisking, singing life; inaugurating so 
many successive geologic mornings, over the smoothed 
graves of the previous extinct races; and preluding in this 
manner the strange world-history of sin and redemption, 
wherein all the grandest issues of existence lie. This 
whole tossing, rending, recomposing process, that we call 
geology, symbolizes evidently, as in highest reason it 
should, the grand spiritual catastrophe, and christian new- 
creation of man; which, both together, comprehend the 
problem of mind, and so the final causes or last ends of all 
God’s works. What we see, is the beginning conversing 
with the end, and Eternal Forethought reaching across the 
tottering mountains and boiling seas, to unite beginning 
and end together. So that we may hear the grinding lay- 
ers of the rocks singing harshly— 


Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree— 


and all the long eras of desolation, and refitted bloom and 
beauty, represented in the registers of the world, are but 
the epic in stone, of man’s great history, before the time. 


OF SIN AND REDEMPTION. 207 


Aud of this we are the more impressed, in the fact so 
powerfully shown by Mr. Agassiz, that the successive new 
populations of the geologic eras are, beyond a question 
fresh creations of God, summoned into being by his act, 
and fashioned in the mods of his thought; impossible to 
be created or fashioned, by any existing laws and forces 
in nature. He does not say distinctly that they are super- 
natural creations, he might not so understand the word, as 
to be clear of all disrespect in regard to it, but the fresh 
act. of creation which he affirms and even scientifically 
proves, exactly answers to our definition of the supernat- 
ural, as being the action of some agent on the conditions 
of nature from without those conditions, and so as to pro- 
duce results which the laws of cause and effect in nature 
could not produce. What a consideration then is it that 
the great question of the supernatural, which is now put 
in issue, and upon which depends even the faith of Chris- 
tianity, as a grand supernatural movement of God on the 
world, is settled, over arid over again, and the verdict as 
many times recorded in the rocks of the world! 

In these great anticipative facts of the world, it is very 
nearly impossible to resist the conviction of the eternal 
and original subserviency even of its solid material struc- 
ture to religion, and especially to Christianity. And ex- 
actly this ought to be true, if the Christ and his religion 
bs such, and so related to the creation, as we suppose him 
to be. All God’s most ancient works are of course to be 
found thus in the interest of Christianity, answering to it 
from their distant past, types of its coming in the distant 
future, one with it in design, as being issues of the same 
Eternal Mind. 

Tt is difficult also to resist the conviction of a use more 


208 DEFORMITIES INCREASE, 


specific and pointed than those to which we have referred. 
Thus, i respect to misshapen monsters and deformed 
growths, it is a remarkable fact that, as uhe layers of ge: 
clogy rise, and creatures are produced that stand higher in 
the scaie cf organic perfection, the number of deformities 
and retrograde shapes is multiplied. This fact has been 
strikingly exhibited> by Hugh Miller, in refutation of the 
development theory. It permits another use taken asa 
moral type of human history. Thus the serpent race 
makes no appearance, he observes, till we ascend to the 
tertiary formation, and there it wriggles out into being, 
contemporaneously with the more stately and _ perfect 
order of mammalia. When the mammoth stalks 
abroad as the gigantic lord of the new creation, the ser- 
pent creeps out with him, on his belly, with his bag of 
poison hid under the roots of his feeble teeth, spinning 
out three or four hundred lengths of vertebree, and haying 
his four rudimental legs blanketed under his skin; a 
mean, abortive creature, whom the angry motherhood of 
nature would not go on to finish, but shook from her lap 
before the legs were done, muttering, ominously, “cursed art 
thou for man’s sake above all cattle; upon thy belly shalt 
thou go and dust shalt thou eat ail the days of thy life,”’— 
powerful type of man, the poison of his sin, the degrada- 
tion of his beauty under it, the possible abortion of his 
noble capacities and divine instincts! 

It is also shown by Miller, in the same manner, that the 
fishes lost ground, or grew deformed in organization, as 
vue human era drew nigh.* Regarding man as the highest 
form of organization, having a head, neck, two hands, and 
two feet—the latter answered by the four legs of the beasts, 


ba eee 


* Footprints of the Creator, pp. 183-191. 


aS THE HUMAN ERA APPROACHES 20¢ 


the two wings and legs of the birds, and the four fins of the 
fishes—every creature will be most perfect in form, when his 
parts are adjusted most nearly according to the human analo- 
gies; and it is found that all the first fishes were actually in 
this type of agreement. In the second formation, the for- 
ward fins are found to have slid up, not seldom, and stuck 
themselves close upon the head, leaving no neck; much 
as if aman were to appear with his arms fastened to hig 
head, close behind his ears. In a later formation, both fins, 
representing hands and feet, have mounted into the same 
position; and, as if this were uncomfortable, some races 
have dropped a pair altogether. Then, next, in the chalk 
formation, where the nearest vicinage to man is attained, 
appears the remarkable order that includes the plaice, tur- 
bot, halibut, and flounder; the two latter of which are fa 
miliar in our American waters. They have the four fins 
stuck close upon the head. They are capsized so as to 
swim on the flat side. The mouth is twisted so as to ac- 
commodate their false position. The two sides of the jaw 
do not match, one being much larger and having three or 
four times as many teeth as the other. The backbone is 
lateral, occupying one side of the body. One eye is fixed 
in the middle of the forehead, and the other, which is much 
smaller, is thrust out upon one of the side promontories 
of the face. 

What now does this strange process of deformity, chroni- 
eled in the rocks of the world, signify? What but that 
God is preparing the field for its occupant; setting it with 
types of obliquity that shall match, and faithfully figure to 
man the obliquity and deformity of hissin? Now then heat 
last appears, the lord of the creation, a being supernatural, 


clothed in God’s image, a power to be trained up to great- 
18* 


210 USHS OF SUCH DEFORMITIES. 


ness and glory—only he will find his way to the magnii- 
cent destiny of character appointed him, by struggling on, 
through falls, disorders, and perishing abortions, and de- 
formities of misdoing, that implicate the whole creation, 
causing it to groan and travail with him in his trial. 

It will signify much to such a being, and especially in 
the advanced ages of time, when he seems to be conquering 
the world by his sciences, to find that, as the creation of God 
was rising in order, and higher forms of life were appear- 
ing, in a series to be consummated or crowned by the ap- 
pearing of man, tokens also of retrogradation, abortion, 
defect, deformity, were also beginning to appear; as if to 
foretoken the moral history he will begin, and the humilia- 
tions through which he will require to be led. Coming in 
originally as lord and occupant to have dominion, and 
taking possession of it finally in the higher dominion of 
science, a most strange, powerfully humbling lesson meets 
hira, exactly suited to his want, and one that ought to 
moderate all undue conceit of science in him, and temper 
him to that teachable state of inquiry that allows the no- 
bler and diviner truths of Christianity to visit his heart. 
What does it mean—let any student of nature answer— 
what does it mean that a Perfect Mind, whose very thoughts 
are beauty, generates in the same era and side by side with 
man, such outrageous deformities as we see, for example, in 
the halibut species? Here is a deep lesson, worthy of much 
study. There is plainly no account to be made of such ap- 

-pearances, or facts, till we bring in the sovereignty of moral 
ideas, and assume the necessity of moral types and lessons. 

On the whole, as the result of this inquiry into the 
anticipative consequences of sin, we most naturally take 
up the conviction, that the world, or what we call the cre- 


PANTHEISTIC VIEW OF THEM Ot 


ation, is t.of so much a completed fact as a conatus, strug. 
gung up concomitantly with the powers that are doing 
battle in it for a character; falling with them in their fall, 
rising with them or to rise, to a condition, finally, of com: 
plete order and beauty. There is much to be said for such 
an expectation, and it appears to be just what is held up, 
in the promise of a new heavens and earth, wherein dwell: 
eth righteousness. 

The pantheistic form of naturalism, it is well known, 
makes a very different account of the abortions and de- 
formities of the world, and also of its future possibilities. 
[t assumes, for a fact, that nature is an incomplete or par- 
tially developed form of being, going on toward perfee- 
tion, under laws of development, contained in itself; there- 
fore necessarily plunging into mischances, and producing 
uncomely, or unperfect fruits. Accordingly God, who is 
in fact the all of nature, is a tardy but sublime Naturus, 
who is sometime about to be, if he can attain to a more 
complete consciousness in his children, and be cleared of 
the blundering process of development by which necessity is 
at work to shape him into order. Meantime, we ourselves 
are blundering on with him, they suppose, undergoing a like 
development. What we called sin, before we became phi- 
losophers, we now call development, and excuse ourselves 
from all blame in it, because we are only parts of nature, 
subject to her laws; parts, that is, of God, and subject to 
the eternal fate that rules him. 

That a soul, pressed down by the great questions of ex- 
istence, should sometime reel into this gulf, is scarcely a 
subject of wonder; but no healthy, manly soul, none but 
one that is kag-ridden by the dark and spectral difficul- 
ties of the world, will long stay in it. There is in the 


212 PANTHEISTiC VIEW OF THEM, 


scheme, at first view, a certain imposing air’ of rational 
magnificence—it includes so much, it handles even God 
and his mystery so coolly, and clears the question of evil 
by a solution so easy. 

Bat after all it is not cleared. We have called our con- 
sciousness a fool, it is true, in reporting such a thing as 
sin, and have taken the police of our souls into custody to 
escape the conviction of it, and still the sin is here—in us 
and around us. We can not act our part, for any two 
hours of our life, without assuming its reality. What then 
becomes of our great philosophy, when, amusing itself thus 
in its lofty airs of reason, it is yet confronted every mo 
ment by the plain, simple denial and even scorn of our 
consciousness ? 

With this too comes the argument of our woe. The 
air of such a creed is too thin to support our life. There 
is no object meeting us to fill our want, there is no mean- 
ing, or heart, in the mute, dead All; nothing in existence 
to give it significance, or inspire any great act or senti- 
ment. We live in a disabled, stunted subjectivity. The 
inspiration of faith is replaced by the impotence of con- 
ceit. ‘The world is a blunder, consciousness is a lie, the 
dark things of sin are developments, and the All is a Uni- 
versal Mockery. And then what remains but to go back 
and set up again the great first truth, which no mortal ean 
spare for a day, that whatever is wanted, is—therefore Ged, 
the Living God shall be our faith; for Him we want, as 
the complemental good, without which existence is but a 


- name for starvation. 


How many things too are there in the world, after all, 
that can nowise be accounted for by this pantheistic 
theory. If the disorders and deformities of nature are God 


UNREASONABLE AND UNSATISFACTORY. 218 


in partial development, how is it conceivable that any 
being in a state so raw, could ever have organized such 
complicated structures—human bodies for example— 
where the design is so evident, the parts so many and 
delicate, the offices so manifold, the unity so perfect. 


tt is inconceivable that any power—call it God, or nature, 


or by whatever name 


capable of constructing an organiza: 
tion so wonderful, should still be struggling up into order, 
through such grotesque and misbegotten shapes as are here 
accounted for, by the necessary imperfection of its, or his 
development; composing first the glorious order of the 
astronomic mechanism, then faltering afterward in the 
absurd composition of a flounder; able io fashion a crea- 
ture of reason, but not to stand the criticism of reason; 
able to start new races of living creatures in the successive 
eras of geology, but having yet no will to start any thing, 
apart from the control of fate. And what can such a doc- 
trine make of Jesus Christ, what place does it provide in 
the world for such a being? If nature can develop noth- 
ing perfect; if, by reason of inherent defect, it must needs 
develop itself in blunders of abortion, deformity, and pain; 
will it still suffice to form the mind, fashion the beauty, 
finish the character of a Jesus? 

But I am assuming here a superiority and perfection of 
order in the character of Jesus, that may not be admitted 
by the pantheist, and as the question is hereafter to be dis- 
eussed, and will be made a point of consequence in the 
argument, I desist for the present; only requiring \t of 
such as look for a God in development, to answer how 
their blind force, called nature, staggering on through the 
disorders, abortions, and deformities of so many ages, and 
even falling into retrogradations as remarkable as its im- 


214 THE IMMENSE SIGNIFICANCE OF SIN, 


provements, can be imagined to have produced such a soul 
and character as that of Jesus; a being, whether perfect 
or not, so high, so peculiar, original, pure, wise, great in 
goodness ? 


In this and the preceding chapter, we have now traced 
the consequences of sin: there the consequences that must 
needs follow it, as effects their causes, showing what results 
of mischief and disorder it reveals in the soul, the body, 
society, and the world; here accounting for a large display 
of correspondent facts in the geologic history precedent, 
or before the arrival of man, showing that they still are 
as truly consequences of the fact of sin as the others, 
being only just those marks that God’s intelligence, plan- 
ning the world and shaping it, even from eternity, to the 
uses and issues of a trial comprehending sin, must needs 
display. Sin, it will be seen, is, in this view, a very great, 
world-transforming, world-uncreating fact, and no such 
mere casualty, or matter by the way, as the superficial 
naturalism, or half naturalistic Christianity of our time 
supposes. It is that central fact, about which the whole 
creation of God and the ordering of his providential and 
moral government, revolves. The impression of many 
appears to be, that sin is this or that particular act of 
wrong, which men sometimes do, but which most men du 
not, unless at distant intervals; and who can imagine that 
any thing very serious depends on these rather exceptional 
misdeeds when, on the whole, the account is balanced by 
so many shows of virtue? The triviality and shallowness 
of such conceptions are hardly to be spoken of with 
patience. It is not seen that when a man even begins ta 
sin he must needs cast away the principle, first, of all 


IS THUS DISCOVERED. 215 


holy obedience, and go down, thus, into a general lapse 
of condition, to be a soul broken loose from principle 
and separated from the inspirations of God. Only a very 
little philosophy too, -conceiving the fact that sin is the 
acting of a substance, man, as he was not made to act, 
must saflice to the discovery that, in a system, or scheme 
of perfect order, it will start a ferment of discord among 
causes, that will propagate itself in every direction, carry- 
ing wide-spread desolation into the remotest circles. The 
whole solidarity of being in the creation, physical and 
spiritual, is necessarily penetrated by it and configured to 
it. Character, causes, things prior and post, all that God 
embraces in the final causes of existence, somehow feel 
it, and the whole creation groans and travails for the pain 
of it. The true Kosmos, in the highest and most per- 
fectly ideal sense of that term, does not exist. Nature is 
become unnature, and stopping at the point reached, 
which of course we do not, we must even say that the 
vreation of God is a failure. 

But there is an objection to be anticipated here which 
requires our attention, before we dismiss this part of our 
subject. It is that no proper Kosmos, no crystalline order 
of nature, according to the view stated in this chapter, has 
ever yet existed. For, if we speak of the state of unna- 
ture as a consequence of sin, that state of unnature has 
existed, in part, or as far as it should, anticipatively, 
through all the precedent eras and geologic processes of 
the world. The true ideal system of nature, therefure, has 
never existed, and there was never any such condition, or 
chime of order to fall from, or to shatter by sin, as we are 
trying all the while to suppose. All which is certainly 
true, if we must go entirely back of God’s purposes and 


216 THE KOSMOS STILL EXISTS. 


beyond them to find it; for what we have been traving as 
the anticipative consequences of sin is nothing but the 
working of his ancient counsel concerning it. But the 
real truth is that nature, original and true nature, has ex- 
isted and does now exist; for, if we call our present state, 
as we truly should, a condition of unnature, we mean by 
it nothing more than that the causes included im pure 
nature are working now more or less retributively, pain- 
fully, diseasedly, and so as to create a state of dislocation 
in the outward harmonies; a state of incapacity and bond- 
age in the spiritual aspirations of the soul. Nature 2s un- 
nature, when her causes are acting retributively—they are 
not, in such cases, discontinued, or thrown out of their 
law; but they act, in their law and under it, as perfectly 
and systematically as ever. The unnaturalness oi our pres- 
ent state under sin consists, not in the fact that nature is 
gone by, or is broken up, but only in the fact that her causes 
are all at work on the contrary ingredient, sin. It is as if 
a good and healthy stomach were at work upon a stone, to 
digest it—still it is acting by its own laws and powers, as 
truly as if the stone were meat, though its acting 1s only 
a throe of distress. Were every thing, indeed, now rolling 
on, in sweetest bonds of harmony, according to the 
pure ideal of what we call nature, nothing of bad conse- 
quence or penal and retributive action any where appear: 
ing in it, no disorder of sin visible any where as a fact 
of anticipation, still nature would not be more truly extant 
than now; for the disorder and unnature we speak of are 
really order and nature chastising the false fact, sin; 
which process of chastisement and groaning we call unna- 
ture, only because it does not answer, thus far, to the ideal 
working of the scheme, disturbed by no such enemy 


NATURE AS A WHOLE, 219 


of God and all good as it has here met. Nor does i$ make 
auy the least difference, except with some speculative 
wordsman, grubbing under space and time, whether death 
and prey and other like consequences of sin began te 
work, before the arrival here of man, or only after. If 
God’s Whole Plan respects the fact of sin before the fact, 
the scheme of nature was none the less real or perfect, 
because of the unnature working anticipatively in it, any 
more than it follows that the unnature subsequent has dis- 
continued nature, whose retaliatory action it really is, and 
nothing more. 

Onnature then—this is our conclusion—a far-reaching, 
all-comprehensive state of unnature, 1s the consequence of 
sin. It mars the body, the soul, society, the world, all 
time before and after. What an argument then have we, 
and especially from the ante-dated tokens of evil, for the 
oelief that God’s original plan comprehends a rising side, 
an economy supernatural, that shall complement the dis- 
order and fall of nature, having power to roll back its cur- 
rents of penal misery and bring out souls, into the estab- 

lished liberty and beauty of holiness. How manifest is it 
in the world’s birth, that God, from the first, designs 
it for a second birth; some grand palingenesza that shall 
raise the fall of nature and make existence fruitful. It 
has been a great fault, as was just now intimated, that we 
have made so little of sin. It is either nothing, or else it 
ig 2 great deal more than it is conceived to be by the mul- 
tilude who admit its existence. The mental and moral 
philosophers make nothing of it, going on to construct 
their sciences, so called, precisely as if the soul had re- 
eeived no shock of detriment; and even the most ortho- 


dox theologians do scarcely more than score it with guilty 
19 


218 BECOME UNNATURE. 


conviction, regarding it seldom as a dynamic force, and 
then with a comprehension too restricted to allow any 
true impression, of its import. Hence, in great part, the 
general incredulity in regard to the supernatural facts of 
Christianity. ‘There can be nothing supernatural, we think, 
because it would violate the integrity of nature. The in- 
tegrity of nature! -What but a world of unnature has it 
»vecome already? And what has sent these hard pangs 
into it and through it but a supernatural force, even the 
human will; for this, we have seen, is a power supernat- 
ural, as truly as God, though not equal in degree; able to 
act on the lines of causes and vary their conjunctions from 
without, even as He is represented in the christian truth to 
do. Hence the disorder and disease; hence the groan- 
ing and travailing in pain together of tne whole creation— 
it is all the supernatural work, the bad miracle of sin. 
No other name will fitly name it. Indeed, if there should 
be, somewhere in the universe, a race of beings that have 
never sinned, and they should have it set before them, in 
all its consequences to the physical order of things, they 
would look upon it, we suspect, as a miraculous agency, 
exerted in God’s universe opposite to himself. And they 
would begin, we fear, to say with Mr. Hume, unless they 
were better philosophers than he, that such a miracle is 
wholly incredible; that the confidence they have in the 
beneficent, harmonious action of nature, is too strong to be 
broken by any possible testimony to such doings. 'There- 
fore this tremendous, all-revolutionizing miracle must be a 
fiction. 

Of course it is nota miracle. It is only a fact super- 
natural, a grand assault of man’s supernatural ageney upon 
the world. We shall speak more definiiely of miracles 


IS THERE TC BE A REMEDY? 219 


hereafter. For the present, we only say that the super. 
natural agency of God in the world’s redemption, is now 
shown to be most clearly wanted; and we do not perceive 
wherein it is more incredible that God should act, in his 
way, upon the lines of natural causes, than that we should 
do it, in ours. Of course he will act with a higher sover- 
eignty, worthy of himself. His divine supernatural power 
will be divine, our human will be human. If we have 
broken or clouded the crystal and can not restore its trans 
parency, he can. If we bring deformity, he will bring 
beauty. If we die, he will bid us live. Will he de this? 
That is now the question that remains, 


CHAPTER VIII. 
NO REMEDY IN DEVELOPMENT, OR SELF-REFORMATION 


WE are now at the point of catastrophe in God’s plan, 
where it is next in order to look about for some remedial 
agency, or dispensation, that shall restore the lapse and 
bring out those results of order and happiness, that were 
proposed by God, as we must believe, in his act of crea- 
tion. Are we then shut up to nature and the hope that 
she will surmount her own catastrophe, or may we believe 
that her inherent weakness will be complemented by a su- 
pernatural and divine movement, that shall organize a new 
economy of life? 

The former is the ground taken by all the naturahzing 
classes of our time. Nothing can take place, they say, 
which is not operated under and by the laws of nature. 
To believe that any thing can take place which is from 
without, or from above the laws of nature, is unphilosoph- 
ical and savors of credulity. That there is such a thing 
as misdirection they will admit, and some will admit also 
the fact of sin; and it will be agreed by them all that, in 
consequence either of misdirection, or of sin, there are 
a great many apparent disasters and disorders in the world, 
or especially in human society, that want some kind of 
remedy. Our present object is to look into their princi- 
_ pal remedies, or grounds of expected restoration, and try 
what virtue there is in them. They are two, or presented 
under two distinct forms, both of which may be taken as 
rival gospels opposite to Christianity. 

By the class who formally reject or ignore Christianity 


—_— 


J 


NO REMEDY IN DEVELOPMENT. 2a 


development is regarded as the universal panacea-—all the 
apparent evils of the world are to be cured by develop- 
ment. 

The class who professedly teach and believe the chris- 
tian gospel, reducing it still to a mere scheme of ethics, o1 
natural virtue, rely more on the individual will to be ex- 
erted in self-government, self-culture, and the doing of 
justice, mercy, and other good works. 

Of these rival gospels, both from within the terms of 
nature, I will now speak, in their order. 

I. Of development, or as it is often phrased, the natural 
progress of the race. 

The world is just now taken, as never before, with ideas 
of progress. The human race, it is conceived, exists un- 
der laws of progress. The philosophers, or would-be phi- 
losophers, have even undertaken to reduce the laws of 
progress to a scientific statement. They conceive that all 
the advanced races of mankind began at the level of the 
savage state, and have been set forward to their present 
pitch of culture, civilization, wealth, and liberty, by laws 
of development in mere nature. The multitude go after 
them, embracing the welcome idea of progress only the 
more enthusiastically, that they are so much taken with 
the new word development, conceiving that there is great 
science in it, or, at least, some unknown kind of power. 
If there are any evils, or bitter woes in society, develop- 
ment is going to cure them; for the laws of development 
are at work to produce progress, and they will as certainly 
do it, as the laws of matter wili determine its motions, 
Al: crime and sin are going finally to be cured in this 
manner, and character is going finally to blossom, on the 


broken stock of nature, even as flowers are developed out 
19* 


222 THE TRUE DEVELOPMENT 


of stocks not broken, ang,roots not poisoned by disease. 
Finding thus a gospel of progress in the world itself and 
the mere laws of existence, what need of any such anti- 
quated mythology as the christian gospel brings us? Or, 
if the argument is not openly stated in this manner, still. 
it is virtually adopted; for how many that suppose Chris- 
tianity to be true, still-have it only as a thing by the way, a 
straw floating down this flood ana passing on with us, to see 
the brave work human progress is doing. If it is not 
called a myth or wild tradition, still the really trusted gos- 
pel is phrenology, chemistry, and the other new sciences, 
with their grand economic creations, such as telegraphs, 
railroads, steamboats, and the like—(not omitting the new 
and better bible discovered in the oracles of necromancy;) 
and these are going at last to raise the world, no thanks 
to Christianity, into a state of universal brotherhood and 
felicity! The lowest charlatans and some of the most culti- 
vated savans hold much the same language, and trust in 
the same gospel of development. 

Now that there is, or should be such a thing as devel- 
opment, we certainly admit. All the human faculties are 
capable of development by exercise or training, and every 
human being will, of necessity, be developed to a certain 
degree, both in mind and body, by the growth of years 
and the necessary struggles of life. But that human so- 
ciety was ever carried forward, by a single shade, in the 
matter of religious virtue, under mere laws of natural de- 
velopment, we utterly deny. It is even a fair subject of 
doubt whether any nation, or race of men, was ever ad- 
vanced in civilization by inherent Jaws of progress. Cer- 
tain it is that no individual was ever cleared of sin by de- 
velopment, or restored even proximately to the state of 


INCLUDES REGENERATION, 295 


primal ord2r and uprightness; equally so that the vast, far: 
spreading, organic woes of the world are forever immedi- 
cable by any such remedy. 

In one view, it inay be rightly said that the whole ob. 
ject of God, in our training, is to develop in us a charac- 
ter of eternal uprightness; developing also, in that man- 
her, as a necessary consequence, grand possibilities of so- 
cial order and well beiug; though, when we thus speak, we 
include the fact of sin and the engagement with it of a 
supernatural grace, to lift up the otherwise remediless fall 
of nature. But this, if we must have the word, is chris- 
tian development; a development accomplished, by carry- 
ing us across and up out of the gulf of unnature, where 
the hope of all progress and character was ended. We 
are developed, in this sense, by and through an experience 
of that state of wrong, whose woe it is that it is the fall of 
nature and, in that sense, the end of all development. 
But this, it will be seen, is not the popular doctrine of 
progress, which assumes the fact of a progress in night 
lines, without any call for supernatural interference, with- 
out any regenerative or new-creative process. ‘There may 
be hard throes of suffering experience and bitter struggles 
with individual and social evils, but time, it 1s supposed, 
will teach, and experience redeem, and so the great battle 
of natural development will lead to final victory. In this 
manner, progress, it is supposed, will at last cure all the 
evils which we have been recapitulating as the fruit and fall 
of sin. Thatsucha hope is groundless we will now under. 
take to show. 

Consider, first, the savage state, whence it is continually 
assumed that history and civilization spring. The doctrine 
is that all the advanced nations of mankind began as sav- 


224 THE SAVAGE RACES 


ages, and that all the peoples of the world now existing, 
are on their way up, out of the savage state, into civiliza- 
tion and a state of social virtue. Contrary to this, no say- 
age race of the world has ever been raised into civilization, 
least of all, into a state of virtue, by mere natural devel- 
opment. All which is evident by just that which distin- 
guishes the savage state; for it is the principal and, in fact, 
only comprehensive distinction of the savage races, that 
they are such as have fallen below progress, living on trom 
age to age without progress, and sometimes quite dying 
out; for the simple reason that there is no sufficient capac- 
ity of progress left, to perpetuate their life, in proximity 
with more advanced races. They are beings, or races 
physiologically run down, or become effete, under sin; 
fallen at last below progress, below society, become a herd 
no longer capable of public organization, and a true, social 
life. It signifies nothing for such races to ask more time; 
time can do nothing for them better than extermination, 
It is well, if even a gospel and a faith above nature can 
now get such hold of them as to raise them. ‘They are, in 
fact, just as far off from the original unpracticed, unde- 
veloped state of nature, as the most advanced races; and, 
as David said over the child—“T shall go to him but he 
shall not return to me,” so it is possible for the living and 
advanced races to go downward, but never for these dead 
ones, unassisted, to rise. We have proofs enough that, 
peoples advanced in culture may become savages, but no 
_ solitary example of a race of savages that have risen toa 
civilized state, by mere development. And the real fact 
is, that we may much better assert a law of natural dete- 
rioration, than a law of natural progress; for, apart from 
some influence or aid of a supernatural kind, the deterio- 


MAKE NO PROGRESS. 225 


ration of society, under the penal mischiefs of sin, would 
be universal. By the supposition it should be so; for, as 
all society is uuder sin, it is of course suffering the retri- 
butive action of penal causes, and as all discord propagates 
only greater discord and can not propagate harmony, it 
follows that the run of society under sin must be down: 
ward, from bad to worse, unless interrupted by some re- 
medial agency from without. 

It is somewhat difficult to test our particular opinion on 
this subject by actual examples; for we can not common- 
ly trace the unhistoric and subtle methods, in which any 
race of men may have been impregnated with new possi- 
bilities; sometimes by other religions, with which they 
are made conversant by commerce and travel; sometimes 
by sporadic and supernatural revelations; traces of which 
are discernible, not only in the extra-Jewish examples 
of Jethro, Job, and Cornelius, but in the literature of 
all the cultivated races, and sometimes, here and there, in 
the demonstrations even of the wild races. That the old 
Pelasgic race was raised, by a mere natural progress, to the 
high pitch of culture displayed by the Greek civilization, 
we have no reason whatever to believe. Their literature, 
from Hesiod downward, is sprinkled with too many traces 
of sentiment derived from the Jewish and Egyptian relig- 
ions, to suffer the opinion that they are a nation thus ad- 
vanced, by the simple motherhood of nature. ‘The Roman 
civilization was, in fact, a propagation of the Greek, with 
the advantage of a right infusion from her serious and 
venerable fathers, who, like Numa, communed with invis- 
tble powers in retired groves and silent grottos. The 
Teutonic race, often named as an example of natural de- 
velopment, is known to have been set forward by the 


226 THE SAVAGE IS NOT A FRESH, 


civilizations it conquered and its early conversion to the 
Christian faith. Meantime how many great and powerful 
races have become extinct. We look for the Ninevites 
with as little hope as for Ninus himself. The Assyrians, 
Babylonians, and Medes are also vanished. The Egyp- 
tians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Romans, once the great 
powers of history and civilization, are extinct. The 
Aztec race, run down to such a state of incapacity as not 
even to understand their own monuments, or know by 
whom they were built, we rightly call savages, and look 
upon as having just now come to their vanishing point. 

What now does it mean that so many races, empires, 
languages of the world, have become extinct? Is this a 
token of infallible development? Do we see in this the 
proof that all the evil and sin of the world are going, at 
last, to be surmounted and cleared by the inevitable law of 
progress? What would our new prophets of development 
say, if they were told, when exulting so confidently in the 
glorious future of their own and all other nations, that a day 
will certainly be reached, when the Anglo-American race 
is become an extinct race, Washington a contested locality, 
and the Constitution of the United States a hopeless search 
of the world’s antiquarians? Distant as such an expecta- 
tion may be from our thoughts, and contrary as it may be 
to the illimitable progress of which we hear so often, it is 
only that which has happened a hundred times alreacly, 
and, Christianity apart, may as well happen again. 

We have spoken of the evident falsity of the supposi- 
tion, that all the advancement of the world begins at an 
originally savage state; that being, in fact, no first, but an 
old and decayed state rather, where long ages of deterio- 
ration under sin have finally extirpated the original possi- 


BUT AN OLD STATES. “ORG 


bilities of advancement. The first stage of human so- 
ciety was simply a stage of crudity, or crude capacity, 
and was not more remote from the state of high 
civilization than it was from the low, decrepid, ani- 
malized condition which we now designate by the term 
savage. All races begin together at the state of simple 
being, or crude capacity, and only make the fatal leap of 
sin together. After that they separate, some ascending, 
led up by their holy seers and lawgivers, and others, not 
having or not giving heed to such, going down the scale 
of penal deteriorations to become savages. <A full half 
the globe is peopled thus by tribes which are either 
reduced to the savage condition, or else are far on their 
way toward it; humbled in capacity, physically deterio- 
rated, and that, to such a degree, that the springs of recu- 
perative force appear to be quite gone. Considering now 
the certain fact, that all these had their beginning in a 
simply crude state, having the same high possibilities and 
affinities, which the races had that are now most advanced, 
what are we to think of mere development? This advant- 
age or condition of crude possibility they had, many thou- 
sands of years ago, and the result is what we see. Having 
run down thus miserably under the boasted gospel of 
natural progress, what hope is there in this gospel for the 
final restoration of all things? 

It is fatally opposed too by the geologic analogies. 
Here it stands, the settled verdict of science itself, that the 
successive eras of vegetable and animal life have not been 
introduced, by any law of progress, or by any mere devel- 
opment of nature and her forces. The attemvts that have 
heen made to show this are even pitiable failures. They 
ask us, in fact, to believe greater miracles in the name of 


RAC adie 


228 THE HEALING FUNCTION, 


development than any we encounter in the guspel hist i a 
Thus, we have displayed in the new creations of the rocks 
themselves, a standing type of that moral new crea- 
tion, by which the distempered and fallen races of the 
world are to be raised up. Lest we should think any 
such divine intervention incredible, and try to find some 
better hope for man in the gospel of development, we are 
here familiarized with the fact, that no such law of devel- 
opment has been able to carry on the geologic progress of 
the planet, and that God has been wont, in all its ancient 
depopulations, to insert new germs of life creatively, and 
people it with living creatures fresh from his hand. 

Again it is a consideration scarcely less impressive, that 
Gcd has managed to insert into the physiological history 
of animals and vegetables an always present, living type 
of the process itself, by which, as transcending all mere 
development, his supernatural remedy operates; so that 
we may see it, as 1t were, with our eyes, and become famil- 
iar with it. I refer to that wondrous, inexplicable func- 
tion of healing, discovered in the restoration or repair of 
animals and vegetables, that are wounded or sick. When 
a tree, for example, is hacked, or bruised, a strange nurs- 
ing process forthwith begins, by which the wound is 
healed. A new bark is formed on the edges of the 
wound, by what method no art of man can trace, the 
dead matter is thrown off, and a growth inward narrows 
the breach, till finally the two margins meet and the tis- 
sues Interweave, and not even a scar is left. So in all the 
flesh wounds of animals, and the fractures even of bones, 
So too in regard to all diseases net terminating mortally ; 
they pass a crisis, where the healing function, whatever it 
be, triumphs over the poison of the disease and a recovery 


NO MODE OF DEVELOPMENT. 22S 


follows, in which the whole flesh and fiber appear even 
to be produced anew. 

Here then is a healing power, whose working we can no 
way trace, and one that, if we look at the causes of disin- 
tegration present, appears even to accomplish what is im- 
possible. Regarding the body as a machine—and taken as 
a merely material organization what is it more?—it is 
plainly impossible for it to heal, in this manner, and repair 
itself’ The disordered watch can never run itself into 
good repair. In machines, disorder can only propagate 
and aggravate disorder, till they become a wreck. The 
physicians and physiologists call the strange healing fune- 
tion the wis medicatriz; as if it were some gentle, feminine 
nurse, hidden from the sight, whose office it is to expel the 
poisons, knit the fractures, and heal the wounds of bodies. 
And as names often settle the profoundest questions, so it 
uppears to be commonly taken for granted here, that the 
healing accomplished is wrought by a nursing function 
thus named, as one of the inherent properties of vital sub- 
stances. It may be so or it may not; for the whole ques- 
tion is one that is involved in the profoundest mystery. 
The healing property may be one of the incidents of lifa 
itself, or it may be a distinct power whose office it is to be 
the guard and medicating nurse of life, or it may be the 
working of a grand supernatural economy set in closest 
vicinage to nature, to be the physical, visible, always pres- 
ent token of a like supernatural economy in the matters 
of character and the soul. But whatever view we take of 
this healing power in physiology, or whatever account we 
make of it, these two points are clear. 

First that the healing accomplished is no fact of devel- 


opment. There is no difficulty in seeing how existing 
20 


980 THE HEALING FUNCTION 


tissues and organs may create extensions within their own 
vascular sphere, and thisis development. Butwhere a new 
skin or bark is to be created, or a new interlocking made of 
parts that are sundered, the ducts and vesicles that might act 
in development, being parted and open at their ends, want 
mending themselves. Thus, when the parts of a fractured 
bone are knit together, and we see them reaching after each 
other, as it were, across a chasm, where there are no vessels 
to bridge it or carry across the lines of connection, devel- 
opment might well enough make the parts longer, but how 
could it make them unite across the fracture, by which they 
are separated? The development of a tree, wounded by 
some violence, would only enlarge the wound, just in pro- 
portion to the enlargement of the surface which the bark 
should cover. A fevered body does not cure itself by de- 
velopment. As little can we imagine that the restored 
health and volume of the body is created by the develop: 
ment of the fever. No shade of countenance therefore is 
given to the hope that human development, under the re- 
tributive woes of sin, will be any sufficient cure of its dis- 
orders, or will set the fallen subjects of it forward, in a 
course of social progress. 

This also, secondly, is equally clear, that, as the myste 
rious healing of bodies yields the development theory nc. 
token of favor, it is only a more impressive type, on that 
account, of some grand restorative economy, by which the 
condition of unnature in souls and the world, is to be su- - 
_ pernaturally regenerated—just such a type as, regarding 
the relations of matter to mind, and of things natural to 
things spiritual, we might expect to find incorporated, in 
some large and systematic way, in the visible objects and 
processes of the world. And how much does the healing 


NOT DEVELOPMENT. 208 


of bodies signify, when associated thus with the grand 
elemental disorder and breakage of sin! What is it, in 
tact, but a kind of glorious, every where visible sacrament, 
that tokens life, and hope, and healing invisible, for all the 
retributive woes and bleeding lacerations of our guilty, fall 
en state, as a race apostate from God. 

Hence too probably the fact that transactions of healing 
are so closely connected, the world over, with sentiments 
of religion. Perhaps the fact is due, in part, to some la- 
tent association that connects diseases with sin and, to 
much the same extent, connects the hope of healing with 
some possibility of a divine medication. However this 
may be, the mystery of healing, as we are constituted, 
stands in close affinity with God and the faith of his su-, 
pernatural operation. Thus it was that the priests both of 
the Egyptians and the Greeks were their physicians, and 
that their precepts and prescripts of healing were kept in 
their temples. Esculapius too, the god of medicine, had 
his own altars and priests. At a latter period, the Essenes 
and the christian monks, accounted by some to be their 
successors, had their pious explorations of diseases and 
the,sacred powers of remedies; reducing medicine itself to 
a function of religion. Later still, Paracelsus himself  be- 
gan the restoration of medicine, as a kind of chemical the- 
osophy. And as Christianity itself classes healings among 
the spiritual gifts, and calls the elders of the church to 
pray for the sick; so we find that some of our Indian 
tribes have traditions of one whom, as related to the Great 
Spirit, they call the Uncle, and who came into the world 
by a mysterious advent, long ages ago, and instituted the 
“Grand Medicine,” which is, in fact, their religion. 

It is diffienlt tc resist the impression, in such demon 


232. WE HAVE NO FAITH 


strations as these, of some very profound connection be- 
tween the healing of bodies and the faith of a supernat 


ural grace of healing for the disorders of souls. Else why) 


this persistent tendency in men’s opinions of healing, to 
associate the fevered body and the leprous mind, and seck 
the medication of both, in the common rites of religion. 
But there isa shorter argument with the scheme that 
proposes to find.a remedy for all the ills of character and 
society, in what it calls a more complete development. It 
is this: that no one ever dares practically to act on the faith 
vf such a doctrine, whether in the state or the family. he 
civil law is, in fact, and toa very great extent, a restraint 
on development, and has its merit in the fact that it is. 
it forbids men to unfold themselves freely, in their base 
passions and criminal instigations, and deters them from 
it. Were it not for the state, protecting itself by such 
means against development, society would be quite dis- 
solved. What we discover in families is even more re- 
markable. There are multitudes of parents that believe, 
as they suppose, with all their hearts, in the good day 
coming through the progress of human development. 
And as part of the same general faith, their views of edu- 
cation make it to consist simply in educing or developing 
just what is in the child’s nature. But they do not act on 
that principle in the house, and dare not; though probably 
enough they are never aware of the fact. They maintain 
a family regimen that consists, to a great degree, not in 
development but in repression. To let the child have his 
way and act himself out freely, without restraint, is no 
part of their plan. Probably it never occurs to them asa 
rational possibility. Just contrary to this, they lay their 
foundations in a restriction of natural development; hoping 


— ee ee 


IN DEVELOPMENT. 250 


m that manner to extirpate unruly and base instigations, 
and form a habit in the child of doing better things than 
he would most naturally do. And it is remarkable that, 
in the fulfilling of their office, which is so far an office of 
repression, they are acting as a force supernatural. Ac- 
cording to our definition, it will be remembered that hu- 
man wills are strictly supernatural in their action, and the 
child, we here discover, spends all the first years of his 
life under the regulative and repressive action of such 
wills. He is in them, in fact, more truly than he is in na- 
ture, and the house is a little creation made for him by 
their keeping. He is handled in infancy as they direct, fed 
as they direct when he begins to ask for food, clothed as they 
direct, commanded, limited, forbidden, repressed, and so is 
finally grown up to an age of self-regulation. The pro- 
cess may be called his development, but the most remark- 
able thing in it is that it is a restraint of development. 
Whiy this restraint? If development is going to be the gos: 
pel of the world’s redemption, what makes it wise, in the 
common sense of the world, to restrain that gospel? Are 
the ills of society and the world going to be cured toc 
soon? If development can do all that is promised, why 
not give it a hearty godspeed every where, and let every 
human creature, old and young, act out what is in him, in 
the speediest, most unrestricted manner possible? A glance 
mn this direction is sufficient to show us that all we hear of 
inevitable progress, and the necessary laws of develop- 
raent, is hollow and deceitful. It is not development but 
new creation that can bring us the remedies we look for. 
Nature has powers and capabilities that want development. 
Reduced to real unnature (which is her present state,) she 


also has disordered passions, base instigations, greedy ap- 
20* 


234 SELF-REFORMATION, 


petites, ferocious animosities, propensities to canning and 
falsehood, which want no development, and which, if they 
are developed, unrestrained, annihilate all chance of pro- 
gress, and even forbid the existence of society. Mere de- 
velopment therefore promises nothing. 

We come now— 

Il. To the other rival gospel, that which proposes to 
dispense with all supernatural aids, and to restore the dis- 
orders and the fallen character of sin, by a self-cultivated, 
or self-originated virtue. 

Expectation is here rested on the human will, which, in 
our view, may be done, it will be said, with greater rea- 
son, since we make it, even by definition, a supernatural 
power. But there are different orders or degrees, it must 
be observed, of supernatural power; the human, the an- 
gelic, the divine; which all are alike in the fact that the 
will acts from itself, uncaused in its action, but very un- 
like as regards potency, or the extent of their efficacy. ~ 
What we are endeavoring, in our argument, to show, is 
the fact of a divine supernatural agency concerned in the 
upraising or redemption of man. But if man can raise 
himself, by his own will, that is, by his humanly super- 
natural foree, then plainly there is no need of a divine in- 
tervention from without and above nature, to regenerate 
his fallen state. Still it will not be denied by the class of 
teachers most forward in maintaining this forin of natu- 
ralism, that all religious virtue is dependent, in a certain 
sense, on the concourse and spiritual helping of God; 
Only that concourse and helping, it will be said, belongs 
to the scheme of nature, and never undertakes to help us 
out of the retributive woes and disorders of nature; for 
nature is the system of God, including all he does or can 


NO SUFFICIENT HOPE. 235 


rationally be expected to do. To imagine ‘that such a 
mode of piety, or religious virtue, should he maintained 
by the human will, would be less extravagant if there were 
Bo sin, no consequent woes and disorders; though even 
then it would be the faith of a God imprisoned, or en- 
tombed, in the inexorable laws of nature; with whom the 
soul could aspire to no real converse and could have no 
social sympathy, more than with a wall. Before this un- 
bending prisoner of fate, this nature-God, this dead wall, 
he might go on to dress up a character and fashion a mere- 
ly ethical virtue; cultivating truth, honesty, justice, tem- 
perance, kindness, piling up acts of merit, and doing legal 
works of charity; but to call this character religious, how- 
ever plausible the show it makes, is only an abuse of the 
term. Religious character is not legal. It is an inspira- 
tion—the Life of God in the Soul of Man; and no such 
life can ever quicken a soul except in the faith of a Living 
God, which here is manifestly wanting. Not even the 
pure angels could subsist in such a style of virtue; for it 
is the strength and beatitude of their holiness, that it is no 
will-work in them, but an eternal, immediate inspiration 
of God. Consciously it is not theirs, but the inbreathing 
life of their Father. 

But this ethical gospel, this religion acted as in panto- 
mime, becomes even more insipid and absurd, when the 
fact of sin, with all its consequences of distemper and dis- 
order, is admitted. Now the problem is to-find by what 
power the original harmony of nature can be reconstructed, 
and its currents of penal disaster turned back. Can the 
human will do this? That it can act upon the courses 
of nature we know,—sin itself indeed is the staring and 
incoptrovertible proof that it can. But it does not follow, 


236 SELF-RESTORATION 


as we have said already, that the power which has broken 
an egg, or sh'vered a crystal, can mendit. That is a thing 
more difficult, and demands a higher power. 

Consider simply the change that is needed to restore 
the lapsed integrity of a soul. Its original spontaneity to 
good is gone, its silver cord of harmony is broken, the 
sweet order of life is-turned into a tumult of inward bit- 


terness, its very laws are become its tormentors. All its — 


curious, multiform, scarcely conceivable functions, submit- 
ted by its laws to the will, are now contesting always 
with each other and are wholly intractable to its sover- 
elgnty. And still it is expected of the will, that it is 
going to gather them all up into the primal order, and 
reconstruct their shattered unity! Why, it were easier, a 
thousand fold, for man’s will to gather all the birds of the 
sky into martial order, and march them as a squadron 
through the tempests of the air! Manifestly none but 
God can restore the lapsed order of the soul. He alone 
can reconstruct the crystalline unity. Which, if He does, 
it will imply an acting on those lines of causes in its nature, 
by whose penal efficacy it is distempered; and that is, by 
the supposition, a supernatural operation. 

Besides, the work is really not done, till the subject is 
restored to a virtue whose essence is liberty. And how 
is man, by his mere will, to start the flow of liberty? Te 
may do this and do that, and keep doing this and that, 

carefully, punctiliously, suffering no slackness. But it 

will be work, work only, and the play of liberty will 
never come. He can never reach the true liberty till an 

nspiration takes him, and the new birth of God’s Spirit 
oe him a son. The light he manufactures will be 
darkness, or at best a palc phosphorescence, till Christ is 


IS IMPOSSIBLE. 937 


revealed within. Tis self-culture may fashion a picture 
with many marks of grace, but the quickening of God 
alone can make it live. If he relish his work in a degree, 
it will be the relish of conceit—there is no fountain of heav- 
enly joy init, bursting up from unseen depths within. He 
will advance fitfully, eccentrically, and without balance, 
making a grimace here, while he fashions a beauty there; 
for there is no balance of order and proportion till his 
faith is rested in God, and his life flows out from the 
divine plenitude and perfection. . Meantime his ideals will 
srow faster than his attainments, and if he is not wholly 
drunk up in conceit, he will be only the more afflicted 
and baffled, the greater his pertinacity. O, if there be 
any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, 
it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who is honestly set to 
the work of his own self-redemption ! 

Do we then affirm, it will be asked, the absolute inabil- 
ity of a man to do and become what is right before God ¢ 
That is the christian doctrine, and there is none that is 
more obviously true. Wherein, then, it may also be 
asked, is there any ground of blame for continuance in 
sin? Because, we answer, there is a Living God engaged 
to help us, and inviting always our acceptance of his help. 
Nor is this any mere gracious ability, such as constitutes 
the joy of some and the offense of others. No created 
being, of any world, not even the new-formed man be- 
fore his fall, nor the glorified saint, nor the spotless angel, 
had ever any possibility of holiness, except in the embrace 
of God. This is the normal condition of all souls, that 
they be filled with God, acted by God, holding their will, 
in lus, irradiated always by his all-supporting life. Just 
this it is that constitutes the radical idea of religion, and 


238 SELF-RESTORATION, 


‘differs it from a mere ethical virtue. God is the prime 
necessity of all religious virtue, and is only more em- 
phatically so to beings under sin. The necessity is con 
stituent, not penal; it becomes penal only when communi: 
cations originally given to the fallen, but now cast away 
by their sin, require to be restored. 

There is really no difficulty in this question of disability 
under sin, save that which is created by the fogs of unin- 
telligent speculation. It is taken extensively, as if it 
were a question regarding man’s inherent, independent 
ability, when in fact he has no such ability to any thing. 
Can he obey God, or not? is he able to do God’s will, or 
not? is the question raised; and it is understood and dis- 
cussed as being a question that turns on the absolute 
quantities of the man, and not in any respect on relative 
aids and conditions without; much as if the question were 
whether he has weight, apart from all relative weights or 
attractions ? or whether he can stand alone, apart from any 
thing to stand upon? or whether he has power to live a 
year, apart from all food and light and shelter and air? 
The true question of ability is different. It is this: 
whether the subject is able to rise into a holy life, taken 
as insphered in God, and all the attractive, transforming, 
and supporting influences of the grace of God? Apart 

from this, he certainly is not able. By mere working on 
himself and manipulating, as it were, his body of sin and 
death, he can do just nothing in the way of self-perfee- 
tion; and, if he could even do every thing, as regards 
‘self-transformation, there would be no religious character 
in the result, any more than if his works were done before 
the moon. Religious character is God in the soul, and 
without that all pretenses of religious virtue are, In fact. 


IS IMPOSSIBLE. 239 


atheistic. Such is the disability of a fallen man; taken as 
acting on himself; and the condition of an angel, acting 
in that manner, is no better; for he could not begin to act 
thus, without being himself fallen, at the instan!. But if 
the question be what a man has power to do, ts{!sen in the 
surroundings of divine truth and mercy, which in fact 
include the co-operating grace of the divine Spirit, the 
true answer is that he can do all things. He Las, at every 
moment, a complete power as respects doing what God 
requires of him at that moment, and is responsible accord- 
ing to his power. And yet, when we say a complete 
power, we mean, not so much that he is going even then 
to do something himself, as that he is going to have some- 
thing done within, by the quickening and transforming 
power of his divine Lord, in whom he trusts. His power 
is to set himself before power, open his nature to the rule 
of power, and so to live. Hven as we may say that a 
tree has power to live and grow, not by acting on iiself 
and willing to grow, but as it is ministered unto by its 
natural surroundings, the soil, the sun, the dew, the air. 
It has only to offer itself openly and receptively to these, 
and by their force to grow. 

Where, then, it may be asked, is the significance of 
free will, which we have even shown to be a power su- 
pernatural? If the disordered soul can not restore itself, 
or by diligent self-culture regain the loss it has made by 
sin, wherein hes the advantage of such a power, and 
where the responsibility to a life of holy virtue? Our 
answer is, that by the freedom of the will we understand 
simply its freedom as a volitional function; but mere 
volitions, taken by themselves, involve no capacity to 
regenerate, or constitute, a character. Holy virtue is not 


240 RESTORATION POSSIBLE, 


an act. or compilation of acts taken merely as volitions 
but it is a new state or status rather, a right disposedness, 
whence new action may flow. And no mere volitional 
exercise can change the state or disposedness of the soul, 
without concurrent help and grace. We can will any 
thing, but the execution may not follow. To will may 
be present, but how to perform, it may be difficult to find, 
—difficult, that is, when simply acting in and upon our- 
selves; never difficult, never possible to fail in doing, 
when acting before and toward a Divine Helper, trustfully 
appealed to. And this is the power of the will, as regards 
our moral recovery. It may so offer itself and the sub- 
ordinate capacities to God, that God shall have the whole 
man open to his dominion, and be able to ingenerate in 
him a new, divine state, or principle of action; while, 
taken as a governing, cultivating, and perfecting power ir. 
itself, it has no such capacity whatsoever. And this is 
the only rational and true verdict. Say what we may of 
the will as a strictly self-determining power, raise what 
distinctions we may as regards the kinds of ability, such 
as natural and moral, antecedent and subsequent, we have 
no ability at all, of any kind, to regenerate our own state, 
or restore our own disorders. Salvation is by faith, or 
there is none. . 


There is then, we conclude, no hope of a restoration of 
society, or of a religious upraising of man, except in a super- 
-hatural and divine operation. Progress under sin, by laws 
of natural development, is a fiction—there is no hope of 
progress, apart from the regenerative and quickening 
power of a grace that transcends mere natural condi- 
tions and causes. As little room is there to expect that 


ONTVREY she GRACEZOR GoD. 243 


men will be able to heal their own spiritual maladies and 
cultivate themselves into heaven’s order, by a merely eth- 
ical regimen maintained in the plane of nature. The only 
remedy for the human state, under sin, is that which comes 
into nature, as the revelation of a divine force. 

Suppose now there might be found some great and pro- 
foand thinker, who has never come under the impress of 
Christianity, or even heard of such a thing. as a plan of 
supernatural redemption; a man of the highest culture, 
least under the power of superstition; a free-thinker as 


regards the religion of his country and times; and sup- 


pose that he, by the mere force of his own thought, 
struggling with the great problem of humanity, society, 
and progress, should be found to rest his hope deliberately 
on some supernatural remedy, as the only sufficient rem- 
edy for the world; giving forth a testimony that has been 
audited and accepted by the greatest and best minds of 
all subsequent ages; revealing, as it were, a Christianity 
before the time, as far as the want of it and the fact of 
some such operative power are concerned; how unlikely 
will it be that some new science of development, or some 
more rational gospel of self-culture, has just now dis- 
covered the essential weakness or childishness of a super. 
natural faith. Precisely such a wituess we have in the 
great Plato, seconded by the coincident testimony of 
many others, only less conspicuous than he. 

Beginning at the base note of human depravity, he 
says, ‘I have heard from the wise men that we are now 
dead, and that the body is our sepulcher.”* Again he 
says, ‘The prime evil is inborn in souls;” “it is implanted 
in men to sin.”t+ Again, ‘The uature of mankind 


TN eS ee Eee 


* Gorgias, fol. 493. { Leg; poi3l 
1 


- 


242 THE SAME IS HELD, 


is greatly degenerated and depraved, all manner cf dis- 
orders infest human nature, and men, being impotent, are 
torn in pieces by their lusts, as by so many wild horses,’’* 
He also speaks of an “evil nature,” ‘an evil in nature,” 
‘‘a disease in nature,” “a destruction of harmony in the 
soul,” and much more to the same effect. Then again, 
tracing the origin of this diseased state, he says, ‘That 
in times past, the divine nature flourished in men; but, at 
length, being mixed with mortal custom, it fell into ruin; 
hence an inundation of evils in the race.”+ Again, ‘The 
cause of corruption is from our parents, so that we never 
relinquish their evil way, or AON the blemish of their 
evil habit.”t 

Inquiring now for the remedy which is abic to restore 
and re-establish the virtue lost, he discusses at large 
the question, whether virtue can be taught, and delibe- 
rately concludes that it can be produced by no mere teach- 
ing. He says, “If, in this whole disputation, we have 
rightly conceived the case, virtue is acquired, neither by 
nature’s force, nor by any institutes of discipline or 
teaching, but it comes to those that have it, by a certain 
divine appointment [or inspiration,] over and above the 
mind’s own force or exertion.”§ He also adds that, if we 
could be dressed up into a show of virtue by teaching, it 
would be the same as “to be adorned with a shadow, 
whereas virtue 1s a thing real and solid,”—rooted, that is, 
in the heart’s inmost life. The same conviction is ex- 
_ pressed in a different form when he says, “That after 
the golden age, the universe, by reason of that confusion 
that came upon it, would have been quite dissolved, had 
not God again taken it upon him to sit at the helm and 


* Politicus, p. 274. Critias, p. 400. f Timaeus, 103. § Mono., 89. 


/ 


EVEN BY THE WISEST HEATHENS. 248 


_gvvern the world, and restore its disordered and almost 
disjointed parts to their primeval order.”* And accord- 
untly with such a conviction, he recommends a faith in 
divine help and supernatural guidance, and says, “he 
who prayeth to God, and trusteth in his good favor, shall 
do well.”+ Again, “God is the beginning and end of all 
being, and whoever follows his guidance shall be happy.” 
And that he means, by this, to commend a faith in super: 
natural aid, is evident when he says, in his Timezeus, “ that 
beatitude, or spiritual liberty, is only to have the demon,” 
that is, the good spirit, ‘dwelling in us,” alluding probably 
to the remarkable declaration of his teacher, Socrates, 
“that a certain demon, or good spirit, had followed him. 
even from his childhood, with his good suggestion or 
influence, signifying what he should do.” He brings in 
Socrates also maintaining this remarkable dialogue with 
his pupil, Alcibiades: “Dost thou know by what means 
thou mayest avoid the inordinate motions of thy mind?” 
He answers, “Yes.” Soc. “How?” Al. “If thou wilt, 
Socrates.” Soc. “'Thou speakest not rightly.” Al. “How 
then must I speak?” Soc. “Say, if God will,”| &c. 

Here then, we have a man rising up out of heathenisn, 
one of the greatest of mankind, testifying his conviction 
of the disability and ruin of human nature, and his confi- 
dence in some supernatural aid, as the only hope of the 
world—-all this instructed by his own consciousness, and by 
so many years of philosophic study, in the great problem 
of humanity and human progress. For no teacher, even 
of our modern time, is more intent on the possibility of 
some better ideal state of the world and society than he, 


— 


* Politicus, 251. + Epinom., 980. t Leg., T15. 
§ Theages, 128. || Alcib., 135. 


244 THEY ARE OPPRESSED 


In this problem, indeed, it may even be said that he wore 
out his life. 


Seneca speaks quite despairingly of our possible recoy: 


ery byany means. He says, ‘Our corrupt nature has drunk 


in such deep draughts of iniquity, which are so far incor- 
porated in its very bowels, that you can not remove it, 
save by tearing them*out.” And yet he conceives, in 
the faintest manner, some possibility of supernatural aid. 
‘‘No man is able to clear himself, let some one give him a 
hand, let some one lead him out’’* 


as if asking for some 
Christ unknown, to come and bring the soul forth from its 
thralldom. 

He also says, as if he were writing out another VIItk 
chapter of the Romans, ‘ What is it, Lucilius, that, when 
we set ourselves in one way, draws us another, and when 


| we desire to avoid any course, drives us into it? What is 
it that so wrestles with our mind, allowing us never to set- 
\tle any good resolution once for all?” + 


, And Ovid also joins in the same confession—“ If I could, 
| would be more sane. But some unknown force drags me 
against my will. Desire draws me one way, conviction an- 
other I see the better and approve, the worse I follow.” 
“() wretched man that I am, who shall deliver?” is the 
sigh that interprets and fitly concludes their confession, 
Passages in great number could be cited from other an- 
cient writers, in which they express the same conviction, 
that man can never be raised out of his sin, by any mere 


natural force, But these are points of opinion. We pre- 


fer to add, as being more significant, some illustrations 
also of the practical longing they had for the appearance 
of some divine helper, and the manifestation of God in 


ee. ee 


* Ep., 52. + Ep., 52. } Metam, vil.: 18 


BY THE UNCERTAINTIES OF TRUTH. 245 


some gracious revelation of his presence. In illus- 
trations of this kind, we shall see exactly what would be . 
our own condition, if these supernatural manifestations, 
denied by so many in our times, were taken away, and we 
were really set back, as we require ourselves to be, in the 
proper darkness of nature. It was a continual source of 
misery to the most enlightened of the pagan scholars and 
philosophers that, whatever they seemed to discover, or to 
establish by the light of natural reason, was yet never dis- 
covered, never established, but was still overhung by a 
sloud of uncertainty. Thus we hear Xenophanes closing 
off his work on Nature, in these words—“No man has 
discovered any certainty, nor will discover it, concerning 
the gods, and what I say of the universe. For if he ut- 
tered what is even most perfect, still he does not know it, 
but conjecture hangs over all.” 

Oppressed by this feeling of uncertainty, they were only 
goaded the more painfully in their search after the real 
meaning of life, and waited, with a longing only the more 
hungry, for some revelation of divine things, if haply it 
might sometime be given. Thus Plato, speaking in his 
Pheedo of the soul, and its destiny, says—“ It appears to me 
that, to know them clearly in the present life, is either im- 
possible, or very difficult; on the other hand, not to test 
what has been said of them in every possible way, not to 
investigate the whole matter, and exhaust upon it every 
effort, is the part of a very weak man. For we ought, in 
respect to these things, either to learn from others how 
they stand, or to discover them for ourselves; or, if both ° 
these are impossible, then, taking the best of human rea- 
sonings, that which appears the best supported, and em- 


barking on that, as one who risks himself on a raft, so to 
pal 


246 AND TESTIFY THEIR LONGING 


sail through life—unless one could be carried more safely, 
or with less risk, on a secret conveyance, or some Divine 
Logos.” What a condition of hunger for knowledge!—a 
great and mighty soul, prying at the gates of light, to force 
them open, catching the faintest gleams of truth or opin- 
ion, and committing his all tenderly to them as to a slen- ~ 
der raft upon the sea, only venting, with a sigh, the mys- 
terious hint of a Divine Logos, who will possibly come to 
him within, and be a surer light, a safer guide. And this 
dim hint of a better revelation is ventured more boldly in 
his Alcibiades, when he says—‘‘We must wait patiently 
until some one, either a god or some inspired man, teach 
us our moral and religious duties and, as Pallas in Homer 

did to Diomede, remove the darkness from our eyes.” Hoy 

little incredible was it to him, the highest philosophic in- 
_tellect the world has ever seen, that some incarnate mes- 
senger of God, or teacher supernaturally sent, may some- 
time come to enlighten the world! What in fact does he 
tell us, but that he is waiting for Jesus the Christ! 

At-a later period, or about the time of Christ, when the 
faith of the ancient religion or mythology had become 
more nearly extinct, the struggle of souls, shut up to the 
mere darkness of nature and reason, became more sad and 
painful. Strabo, for example, falling back on the religion of 
Moses, received from him a faith in one Supreme Essence, 
who he thought should be worshiped without images in 
sacred groves; and there, he said, “the devout should lay 
themselves down to sleep, and expect signs from God in 

' dreams.”* Not daring to look for any waking experience 
of God supernaturally revealed in the soul, he must still 
indulge the hope that the Eternal will, at least, come to it 


* Lib. XVI. Chap. 2. 


FOR A SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 247 


in the land of sleep and dreams. Poor Pliny, confessing 
too the wretched hunger of his soul, saw no telief to it 
better than suicide. “It is difficult,” he writes, “to say 
whether it might not be better for men to be wholly with- 
out religion, than to have one of this kind [viz., that of 
his country, ] which is a reproach to its object. The vani- 
ty of man, and his insatiable longing after existence, have 
led him also to dream of a life after death. A being full 
of contradictions, he is the most wretched of creatures, 
since the other creatures have no wants transcending the 
bounds of their nature. Man is full of desires and wants 
that reach to infinity, and can never be satisfied. Among 
these so great evils, the best thing God has bestowed on 
man is the power to take his own life.”* Scarcely less 
sad is the desperation of the pagan -Cecilius, represented 
in the dialogue of Minutius Felix, as maintaining that, 
without any reasonable evidence for the old religion, they 
must yet cling to it asa tradition; for he felt that they 
must have some semblance of a religion, some opinion of 
a supernatural care and a converse of Deity with men. 
‘How much better is it,” he said, “to receive just what 
our fathers have told us, to worship the gods they 
taught us to reverence, even before we could have any true 
knowledge of them, to allow ourselves no right of private 
judgment, but to believe our ancestors who, in the infan- 
cy of mankind, near the birth of the world, were even 
considered worthy of having the gods for their friends.” 
What a strait is this for an intelligent being to be in— 
holding fast, by his will, upon the belief of a supernatural 
approach of the gods, in times gone by, without anv pres 
snot evidence! | 


TT ey een as 


* Hist. Nat., Lib. VI. 


248 IN ALL WHICH, THEY ARE 


ft is a very fine thing for many, saturated as they are 
with christian truth, and all but oppressed with the evi- 
dences of a new creating grace and gospel, to invent spec- 
ulative difficulties, and finally take it up as wisdom or the 
better reason, to believe in nothing but mere nature, and 
her laws. But the recoil of the soul from such negations 
will come after, and it will be terrible quite beyond their con- 
ception. We see this in the facts just stated, and yet more 
affectingly in the history of Clement the Roman, and of his 
conversion. He tells how he was harassed from his child- 
hood, by questions which paganism could not help him to 
answer; such as relate to his being and immortality, the 
origin of the world and its continuance, when it began, 
when it will end, and whither his present life 1s to carry 
him. ‘“Incessantly haunted,” he says, “by such thoughts 
as these, which came I knew not whence, I was sorely 
troubled, so that I grew pale and emaciated. * * * IT 
resorted to the schools of the philosophers, hoping to find 
some certain foundation. I saw nothing but the piling up 
and tearing down of theories. Thus was I driven to 
aud fro, by the different representations, and forced to 
conclude that things appear, not as they are in them- 
selves, but as they happen to be presented on this or that 
side. J was made dizzier than ever, and from the bottom 
of my heart, sighed for deliverance.”* Then he tells how 
he resolved to visit Egypt, the land of mysteries and ap- 
paritions, there to hunt up some magician who could 
summon a spirit for him from the other world; for he 
thought, if he could see a spirit, that would settle the ques- 
tion of immortality, and give him a fixed point of truth. 
But in this unhappy state, inquiring, distressed, agitated, he 


* Neander’s ilist., Vol. 1, pp. 32-33. 


WITNESSES FOR CHRIST. 949 


fell in with a christian gospel, heard it preached, there dis- 
covered what his soul had been aching so long and bitterly 
to find, and there he found rest. 

These illustrations from history show us most effectu- 
ally how little of true science there is, after all, in those 
who boast the laws of progress, or a gospel of self-culti- 
vation, as more rational and hopeful than a gospel of faith. 
After all, they may see that, when left to the proper dark- 
ness of nature, it is no such rational and luminous state as 
they thought, but a night of gloom, a longing vacancy, a 
hunger insupportable. Nature has no promise for society, 
least of all, any remedy for sin. 


CHAPTER IX. 


THE SUPERNATURAL COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE AND 
SUBJECT TO FIXED LAWS 


Ir, as we have shown, there is no hope for man, or human 
socicty, under sin, save in the supernatural interposition of 
God, we are led to inquire, in the next place, what rational 
objection there may be to such an interposition? And we 
find two objecitons alleged. ‘First, that any such inter- 
ference of supernatural agency is incompatible with the 
order of nature. Secondly, that the supernatural agency 
supposed, is itself dispensed without law, and contrary, in 
that view, toreason. Of these I will speak in their order, 
And— 

{. I undertake to show that the supernatural divine 
agency, required to provide an efficacious remedy for sin, 
is wholly compatible with nature; involving no breach of 
her laws, or disturbance of their systematic action. 

T have already shown that nature is not, In any proper 
and complete sense, the system of God, but is in fact a 
subordinate member only, of a higher and virtually super- 
natural system, to whose uses it is subject. It is, in fact, 
a Thing; while the real kingdom of God is a kingdom of 
Powers, Himself the Regal Power. Both He and they 
are continually using the Thing, and pouring their activity 
into it, as the medial point of their relationship; and this, 
in a way, we now propose to show, that is nowise incom: 
vatible with its laws; for the very sufficient reason that, 
by these laws, it is originally submitted to their activity, 
Not even what we call the distemper and disorder of 


COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE. 251 


wrong supposes any overturning of those laws, it is only 
a result of mischief, produced by throwing in that which 
provokes their penal consequences. In the same manner, 
it will be seen that not even miracles, wrought by a super- 
natural divine agency, necessarily imply any removal, of 
suspension of such laws; for nature is subjected, by her 
laws, both to God’s activity and to ours, to be thus acted 
on, and varied in her operation, by the new combinations 
or conjunctions of causes, we are able to produce. <Ac- 
cordingly every result produced, in this manner, whether 
by God or by men, represents nature supernaturally acted 
on, not nature overturned; that is, it is natural in one 
view, in another supernatural; natural as coming to pass 
under and by the laws of nature; supernatural as coming 
to pass by new conjunctions of causes, which are made by 
the action of wilis upon nature. 

What an immense action upon nature are we ourselves 
seen to have, as a race, when we consider the multifarious 
wheels and engines we have put at work, the heavy bur- 
dens we carry round the globe in our ships, the structures 
we raise, the cultivation we practice. We make the world, 
in fact, another world. All of which is referrible to a force 
supernatural, in the last degree. Nature, unapplied or 
uncombined by our wills, could do no such thing. Wills 
only have this power, and wills are supernatural. If now 
we have a power so immense over the world, as we see in 
all our works and wonders of contrivance, is it credil-le 
that God can have no way of access to nature, no power 
at all over nature? Is he the only will excluded from a 
sovereignty over it? 

To illustrate this point yet farther, we wi'l suppose 
a company of youth or children, engaged in playing at 


252 THE SUPERNATURAL 


ball. The ball is an inert spherical substance, that will 
lie on the ground forever, unless it is raised by some cause 
out of itself, and will never act, save as it is acted on. It 
has a certain tenacity of parts and an elastic body, but no 
power in itself to move. Nevertheless we see it flying 
through the air in lively play, smitten, caught, thrown-— 
the central object and instrument of what is called a game; 
that is of a social strife between the players. It is, for the 
ume, a medium of commerce, in the lively battle of its 
motions, between so many contesting agents. But the 
motions it has in the air, we observe, represent so many 
arms throwing it by its weight, or driving it by its elas- 
ticity. So far its play is natural only. Then, if we in- 
quire what moves the arms, we discover that it is done by 
the sudden contraction of muscles, acting under purely 
mechanical principles, and this is natural. If now we 
push our inquiry still farther, asking why the muscles 
contracted thus and thus, we discover that this also hap- 
pened, by reason of mandates sent down to them on the 
nervous cord, which, again, was equally natural. But if 
we go still farther and ask what originated or caused the 
wills to originate the mandates, the true answer is, that it 
was the wills themselves, acting by no causation, able to 
act or not; so that, if some one or more of the players is 
a truant from school, or from home, transgressing, in the 
play, a direct order of restriction, he will know that he is 
doing wrong and blame himself for the wrong he does, 
simply because it is an immediate, irresistible conviction 
of his mind, that he is impelled to his disobedience by nu 
cause whatever. Doubtless he has ends, reasons, motives, 
but these are no causes of his act; for he knows that he 
could and ought to have resisted them all Here then we 


ae 


COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE woe 


fmally arrive at a power supernatural, moving all the 
hands and bats of the players. The ball is at one end of 
so many chains of causes, and the free wills of the players 
at the other. The ball would never have stirred but for 
the arms, nor these but for the contractions of the muscles, 
nor these contracted but for the mandates sent down ta 
them, which mandates, in the last degree, are the peremp-: 
tory acts of so many free wills, or powers, that act super- 
naturally, from no causation. Just here then rises the 
question, if the play is thus carried on by causes which, 
in the last degree, are supernatural, is there any overturn- 
ing or disorder of nature imphed in it? Manifestly not; 
and for the simple reason that the bats, and arms, and 
hands, and muscles, are by their very laws subordinated, 
as chains of causes, to the supernatural power that wields 
them. The play is natural therefore, as being through 
and by those subordinated agents; and supernatural, as 
being from that power. We have no thought of a miracle 
in the case, or of any implied overturning of nature 
which is shocking to our faith. On the contrary, the 
event is so common, so remote from any thing extraordi- 
nary, that we are very likely to look upon it as a trans- 
action, wholly in the world of natural cause and effect. 
We come now to the application. Nature is to God 
and his spiritual and free creatures, what the ball is to the 
players. In one view, we may regard the Almighty 
Ruler of the world as the sensorium and active brain of 
the world; having an immediate power of action through 
every member and every line of causes in it; able, in 
that manner, to maintain a constant living agency in its 
events, without really infringing its order, or obstructing 


and suspending its laws in any instance. Nature is plant 
22 


254 THE SUPERNATURAL 


thus to him, as the body of the players to them; and 
as the natural order of their body is not violated by the 
mandates they put upon it, so there is full opportunity for 
God to do his wonders of power and redemption in the 
earth, without violating any condition of natural order 
and system whatever. His access to all the lines of 
causes in nature may be as truly normal as that which 
the soul has, at that secret point of the brain where it 
delivers its mandates to the body. 

We are speaking here, it will be observed, not of God’s 
possible activity, as being the activity of nature. That is 
a different conception, What we now say is, that, sup- 
posing all the forces and laws of nature to continue for- 
ever, there is also room for the perpetual acting of God 
upon the lines of causes in nature, doing his will super- 
naturally in it, or upon it, just as we do, and yet in per- 
fect compatibility with the laws and the settled order of 
nature. He may as well act Himself into the world as 
we, and nature will as little be overturned by his action 
as by ours. Nor will it create any difficulty that He acts 
like Himself, and in ways proportionate to his infinite 
majesty. 

That nature is in fact submitted to his action, as to 
ours, in the manner supposed, is evident from the report 
of science itself For when the geologists show that new 
races of animal and vegetable life have taken a begin- 
ning, at successive points in the history of the creation, 
that whole realms of living creatures disappear again and 
again, to be succeeded by others fresh from the hand of 
God, what does it signify but that the atoms and ele- 
mental forces of nature are so related to God, that they 
do, by their own laws, submit themselves to his will, 


COMPATIBLE WITH NATURE. 255 — 


flowing into new combinations, and composing thus new 
germs of life? These successive repopulations of the 
rocks were not produced by so many overturnings of 
nature—that is too extravagant for belief, and stands in 
no harmony with what we know of God. On the con- 
trary, every element of force and every atom of matter 
concerned in these new births of life, was acting, we are 
to believe, in its moment of new combination, precisely 
as, according to its inherent properties and laws, it ever 
had done and ever will do. It was only instigated by a 
divine force uot in its natural laws; and in the quickening 
of that, yielding itself up, by these laws, to organize and 
live. Nor was the visitation of Mary, glorious and sacred 
as the mystery was, a transaction at all different in prin- 
ciple, or one that involved, in fact, any violation of nature 
not involved in the other just named. So also when we 
discover the world, or human race, groaning under the 
penal disorders and bondage of sin, the deliverance of 
those disorders by a supernatural power involves no over- 
turning of the causes at work, or the laws by which they 
work, but only that these causes are, by their laws, sub- 
mitted to the will and supernatural action of God, so that 
he can arrange new conjunctions, and accomplish, in that 
manner, results of deliverance. Indeed, a physician does 
precisely the same thing in principle, when, appealing as 
he thinks to the laws of substances, he brings them into 
combinations that are from himself, and places them in 
connections to exert a healing force. 

It will farther assist our conceptions and modify our 
impressions of this subject, if we inquire briefly into the 
office and p:obable use of what is called nature. That 
nature is not appointed as any final end of God, we have 


256 NATURE IS ADJUSTED 


before shown. It is only ordained, as we then intimated, 
to be played upon by the powers; that is, by God himself 
and all free agents under him. Instead of being the ver. 
itable system or universe of God, as in our sensuality, o1 
scientific conceit, we make it, we may call it more truly 
the ball or medial substance occupied by so many players; 
that is, by the spiritual universe under God as the Lord of 
Hosts. There could be no commerce of so many players 
in the game referred to, without some medium or medial 
instrument; and the instrument needed to be a constant, 
invariable substance, as regards shape, weight, size, elas- 
ticity, inertia, and all the natural properties pertaining to 
it. If the ball changed weight, color, density, shape, 
every moment, no skill could be acquired or evinced in 
the use of it; there would be no real test in the game, 
and no social commerce of piay in the parties using it. 
Therefore it needed to be, so far, a constant quantity. So, 
demonstrably, there needs to be, between us and God, 
and between us and one another, some constant quantity, 
so that we can act upon each other, trace the effects of our 
practice and that of others, learn the mind of God, the 
misery and baseness of wrong, the worth of principles, 
and the blessedness of virtue, from what we experience; 
attaining thus to such a degree of wisdom, that we can 
set our life on a footing of success and divine approba- 
tion. What we call nature is this constant quantity inter- 
posed between us and God, and between us and each 
other—the great ball, in using which, our life battle is 
played. Or, considering the grand immensity of planetary 
worlds, careering through the fields of light, all these, we 
may say, rolling eternally onward in their rounds of 
order, bearing their wondrous furniture with them, such 


TO RECEIVE THE SUPERNATURAL. 257 


as science discovers, and weaving their interminable lines 
of causes, are the ball of exercise, in which and by 
which, God is training and teaching the spiritual hosts 
of iis empire. They are set in a system of immutable 
order and constancy for this reason; but with the design, 
beforehand, that all the free beings or powers shall play 
their activity on them and into them, and that He, too, 
py the free insertion of his, may turn them about by his 
counsel, and so make himself and his counsel open to the 
ecommerce of his children. 

So far, therefore, from discovering any thing undigni- 
fied or superstitious in the admission of a supernatural 
agency and government of God in the world, it is, in fact, 
the only worthy and exalted conception. It no more 
humbles the world or deranges the scientific order of it 
to let God act upon it, than to let man do the same; as 
we certainly know that he does, without any thought of 
overturning its laws. On the other hand, to imagine, in 
the way of dignifying the world, that God must let it 
alone and simply see it go, is only to confess that 1t was 
made for no such glorious intent as we have supposed. 

To serve this intent, two things manifestly are want- 
ed, and one as truly as the other; viz., nature and 
the supernatural, an invariable, scientific order, and a 
pliant submission of that order to the sovereignty and 
uses of wills, human and divine, without any infringement 
of its constancy. For if nature were to be violated and 
tossed about by capricious overturnings of her laws, there 
would be an end of all confidence and exact intelligence. 
And if it could not be vsed, or set in new conjunctions, 
by God and his children, it would be a wall, a catacomb, 


and pothing more. And yet this latter is the world of 
2% 


258 NO RESTRICTION THEREFORE 


scientific naturalism, a world that might well enough 
answer for the housing of manikins, but not for the exer- 
cise of living men. It would seem to be enough to for- 
ever dissipate any such unbelieving tendencies, simply to 
have caught, for once, the difference between the constancy 
of causes separated from uses, and the constancy of causes 
limbered and subjected to the uses of eternal freedom and 
intelligence. That is the world of causation, this of relig- 
ion; that a dumb-bell exercise for arms that are dumb- 
bells themselves, this a living order, set in the contact 
and consecrated to the uses of spirit; that a world 
as being a world, this a grand gymnasium of powers 
whom God is training for society and commerce with 
himself. 

Furthermore, it is plain that, if there is no supernatural] 
agency of God permissible or credible in the world, then 
there is practically no government over it. It makes no 
difference, touching the point here in question, whether 
we regard nature as being literally a machine, wound up 
to run by its own causes apart from God, or whether we 
regard the causes and laws as being themselves the imme- 
diate action of God, always present to them and in them. 
For if he is present thus, only as the soul of it8 causes 
or the will operating in its laws, then that presence, if 
restricted, as naturalism requires, to the mere run of 
nature, and allowed no liberty of help in the disorders 
of evil, is scarcely better than the presence of Ixion 
at his wheel. If we speak of God, the Almighty, he is a 
being mortgaged for eternity to the round of nature; a 
grim idol for science to worship, but no Father to weak- 
ness or Redeemer to faith. 

Or if we imagine that God has so planned the world 


UPON GOD’S LIBERTY. 259 


of nature that, running on by its own inherent laws and 
causes, it- will always, by a pre-established harmony. 
bring just the events to pass that are wanted; soothe tne 
sorrows, comfort the repentances, hear the prayers, redress 
the wrongs, chastise the crimes of his subjects; still it is 
with our faith practically as if it were living in a mill, 
and not as if it were concerned, hour by hour, with the 
living God. God is really not accessible. We have 
access only to the mill we are in, with joy to feel it run- 
ning! ‘There is no such reciprocity between us and God 
as to answer the wants of our hearts, or the necessities of 
our moral training. 

Besides, if it be maintained that nature is the proper 
universe of God, and that no conception is admissible of 
powers outside of nature acting upon it, to vary the 
action 1t would otherwise have by itself, then follows the 
very shocking consequence that, since the creation, God 
has had and can hereafter have no work of liberty to do. 
Nature is his monument, and not his garment. Not only 
are miracles out of the question, but counsel and action 
also. He is under a scientific embargo, neither hearing 
nor helping his children, nor indeed giving any signs of 
recognition. And the reason is worse, if possible, and 
more chilling than the fact; viz., that if he should stir, 
he would move something that science requires to be let 
alone! A great many christians are confused and chilled 
by a difficulty resembled to this, feeling, when they go to 
God in worship or prayer, that nothing can reasonably be 
expected of him, because reason allows him to do nothing. 
It is as if he were one of those spent meteors to which 
the Indians offer sacrifice—a hard, cold rock of iron, 
which they worship for the noise it made a long time ago. 


260 THE SUPERNATURAL DISPENSED 


when it fell from the sky, and not because it is likely ever 
to make even a noise again. 

Just here, the view we are advancing is seen to have 
an immense practical as well as speculative consequence, 
It finds how to conceive God in a state of as great activity 


now, as he was when he made the world—always active 
froin eternity to eternity. Every work of his hand is 
phant still to his counsel. He is doing something, able to 
do all we want. In all events and changes he has a pres- 
ent concern. He turns about not the clouds only, but all 
the wheels of nature, by his ever-living power and goy- 
ernment. He is an Agent, as much more real than Na:- 
ture, as he is wider in his reach and more sovereign. He 
can produce variant results through invariable causes, 
and so can make the world of things keep company with 
the variant demands of want, weakness, wickedness, and 
merit; of love, truth, justice, and holy supplication, in 
his children. It is no longer as if, at some given point in 
the solitude of his eternity, he waked up and created the 
worlds, since which time he has neither done nor can 
ever be expected to do any thing more, because it is the 
right now of the laws of nature to do every thing unin- 
terrupted. Centrary to this, he is the Living God, and 
van as readily meet us and bend himself and his works 
to our condition or request, as a man, without any in- 
fringement of his body, can berd it to his uses. Nature 
is seen to be subjected to his constant agency by its laws 
themselves, which laws he has never to suspend, but only 
to employ, having the great realm of nature flexible as a 
hand, to his will forever. Now he is no more fenced 
away from us by nature, no more closeted behind it, to 
sleep away his deaf and idle cternitv; bus he is with us 


BY FIXED LAWS. 261 


and about us, filling all things with his potent eneigy and 
fatherly counsel. He maintains a relationship as real and 
practical with us, as we have with each other. 


II. I undertake, in opposition to the objection which 
supposes that the supernatural agency of God is itself sub- 
ject to no law, or system, to show that it is regulated and 
dispensed by immutable and fixed laws. As intelligent 
creatures, we can have no comfort under a condition ruled 
by no law or system, and conformed to no principles of in- 
telligence. We instinctively demand that every thing in 
God’s plan shall stand in the strict unity of reason, even 
as the old astronomers strive to comprehend the heavenly 
bodies and their motions, in the figures of geometry and 
the fixed proportions of arithmetic. This high instinct of 
our nature God, we may be sure, will never violate. 

1. Since God has inserted in our nature this instinctive 
opinion of law, as necessary to the honor of his govern- 
ment and the comfort of our reason under it, we have, in 
the fact, a very certain proof that his government will be 
such as to meet our respect, and satisfy the yearnings of 
our intelligence. 

9. The fact that nature is a realm, organized under fixed 
laws, is itself the best and most satisfactory evidence that 
such is the manner of God also in things supernatural. 
Who that simply looks on the heavenly worlds, for exam- 
ple, can suffer a doubt afterward, that God will do every 
thing in terms of law and strict systematic unity. 

8. Since God is the sovercign intelligence, the Perfect 
Reason, he will himself have an affinity for law and sys- 
tematic unity, as much stronger than we, as he is higher 
in order than we, and broader in the comprehension. of his 


262 THERE ARE DIFFERENT KINDS 


understanding. Hence it is impossible to believe that, ip 
any thing, even the smallest, he will deviate from rules of 


universal application—least of all in the highest order of 
his works, even such as he displays in the grace of our 
redemption. 

4, The moral and religious need we have of such a faith 
makes it indispensable. » To let go of such a faith, or lose 
it, is to plunge at once into superstition. If any christian, 
the most devout, believes in a miracle, or a providence 
that is done outside of all system and law, he is so far 
on the way to polytheism. The unity of God always per- 
ishes, when the unity of order and law is lost. And we 
may as well believe in one God, acting on or against an- 
other, as in the same God acting outside of all fixed laws 
and terms of immutable order. Indeed I suppose it was in 
just this way that polytheism began. The transition ig 
easy and natural, from a superstitious belief in one God 
who acts without system, to a belief in many who will 
much more naturally do the same. 

But the main difficulty here, is not to establish a reason- 
able conviction that the supernatura) works of God must 
be dispensed by fixed laws; it is to find how this may 
be, or be intelligently conceived. And here lies the main 
stress of our present inquiry. - 

To open the way then to a just and clear conception of 
the great fact stated, it will be necessary to enter into some 
important distinctions concerning law, or what is properly 
meant by the word law. | 

The word is used with many varieties of meaning, but 
always, and in all its varieties, having one element that is 
constant, viz., the opinion had-of its uniformity; as that, in 
exactly the same circumstances, it will always and forever 


AND ORDERS OF LAWS. 263 


do, bring to pass, direct, or command precisely the same 
thing. Without this no law is ever regarded as a law. 

Observing this fundamental fact, we notice the distine- 
fion next of natural and moral law. Natural law is the 
law by which any kind of being or thing is made to act 

invariably, thus or thus, in virtue of terms inherent in 
| itself; as when any body of matter gravitates by reason 
of its matter, and according to the quantity of its matter. 

Moral law pertains never to a thing, or to any substance 
in the chain of cause and effect, but only to a free intelli. 
gence, or self-active power. Its rule is authority, not force. 
It commands, but does not actuate or determine. It speaks 
to assent or choice, inviting action, but operating nothing 
apart from choice. It imposes obligation, leaving the sub- 
ject to obey or not, clear of any enforcement, save that of 
conviction beforehand, and penalty afterward. 

It will be seen at once that God’s supernatural works in 
Christ and the Spirit are not reducible under either of 
these two kinds of law, the natural or the moral. Toa 
certain extent God’s nature will be a law to his action, 
even as ours is a necessary law to us. Thus, if we are in- 
telligent, our intelligent nature will manifest effects of in- 
teligence. If we form necessary ideas of figure, spsce, 
time, truth, right, justice, there will be something in our 
action that reveals these ideas. In like manner, if we are 
free agents, it is made impossible for us, by a fixed law of 
nature, to act as mere things, under the law of cause and 
effect. So, if God is infinite in his nature, then it is a fixed 
iew of his nature that he shall indicate infinity in his ac- 
tion, and if he has geometric ideas, that his works shall, 
by a necessary consequence, have some fixed relation to 
the laws of geometry; such as we discover in their spheres, 


2.64. THERE ARE DIFFERENT KINDS 


and orbits, and projectile curves, and in the subtle trian- 
gulations of light. Thus it is rightly aflirmed by the 
ereat Hooker, that “the being of God is a kind of law to 
g.”* And so far does he carry this opinion as 


to hint the probable necessity that God, being both one 


mis workin 


and three, an essential unity and a threefold personality, 
there will, of course, be something in his works corres- 
pondent with his nature. 

So again if we speak of the law moral, that is a law as 
completely sovereign over God as it is over us. It is the 
eternal, necessary law of right. or of love; a law that he 
acknowledges with a ready and full assent forever; that 
which determines the immutable order, and purity, and 
glory of his character. And then, of course, the law ac- 
eepted in his own character, will be the law published to 
his subjects to be the rule of theirs. Moral law then, by 
the free consent of God, shapes the divine character, and 
so the character and ends of his government. 

But though natural law and moral law have much to 
do, as here discovered, in determining and molding all the 
conduct of God, we do not immediately conceive what 1s 
meant by the fact, that the supernatural works of God are 
dispensed by fixed laws, till we bring into view a third 
kind of law, viz., the law of one’s end, or the law which 
one’s reason imposes in the way of attaining his end. 
Moral law, we have said, shapes the character of God, 
and that determines hisend. Since he is a morally perfect 
being in his character, moral perfection or holiness will be 
the last end of his being, that for which he creates and 
rules; for, if he were to value holiness only as the means 
of some other end, such as happiness, then he would even 


— 


* Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol. L, p. 72. 


AND ORDERS OF LAWS. 266 


disrespect holiness, rating it only as a convenience; which 
is not the character of a holy being, but only an impos- 
ure in the name of such a character. Regarding holiness 
tlien as God’s last end, his world-plan will be gathered 
rcuad the end proposed, to fulfill it, and all his counsels 
will crystallize into order and system, subject to that end. 
For this nature will exist, in all her vast machinery of 
causes and laws; to this all the miracles and supernatural 
works of redemption will bring their contributions. Havy- 
ing this for his end, and the supernatural as means to his 
end, the divine reason will of course order all under fixed 
laws of reason, which laws will be so exact and universal 
as to make a perfect system. 

How this may result, we can see from a simple reference 
to ourselves. Thus, if a man undertakes to be honest, 
having that for an end, then it will be seen that his end so 
far becomes a law to all his actions; that is, a law self- 
imposed, one which his reason prescribes, and which, in 
accepting his end, he freely accepts. So if a man’s end is 
to be rich, we shall see that his end is a law to his whole 
life-plan, or at least so far a law that it fails only where 
his reason or judgment falls short of a perfect perception. 
Or we may take a case more exact and palpable, the case 
of a player at the game of chess. The end he proposes is 
to win the game, and that end, subordinating his reason 
or skill, will become a law to every move he makes on the 
diagram, except where his skill is at fault, or his under- 
standing short of comprehension.: If now we suppose 
him to be gifted with a perfect skill, or an all-perceiving 
reason, it will result that every move made will be deter- 
mined with such exactness and uniformity, that, if he were 
tc play the game over a million of times, he would never, 
a3 


- 


2866 GOD'S LAWS, IN THE SUPERNATURAL, 


in a single case, move differently, in exactly the same. cit 
cumstances. 

Here then is what we mean by affirming that all God's 
supernatural acts, providences, and works, supernatural 
though they be, will yet be dispensed, in all cases, by immu- 
table, universal, and fixed laws. It will be so because 
lis end never varies and his reason is perfect. Therefore 
his world-plan, though comprehending the supernatural, 
will be an exact and perfect system of order, centered in 
the eternal unity of reason about his last end. There 
will be nothing desultory in it, nothing irregular, nothing 
so particular as to happen apart from rule and universal 
counsel. The order of the heavens, and the angles of the 
light will not be more perfect, because the reason of the 
supernatural is equally precise and clear. The same 
work will always be done, in the same circumstances, 
without a semblance of variation. Even as the dial, 
under the laws of nature, will make the same shadow, at 
the same hour, for an eternal succession of days, so the 
good gift and perfect from above will come down from 
the Father of lights, punctual and true in its order, as 
from one whose counsel is perfect, and with whom is no 
variableness, neither shadow of turning. Order, everlast- 
ing order, reigns where least we look for it, and where the 
unthinking and crude mind of superstition would deem it 
even a merit, that God had broken loose from his eternity 
of law, to bless the world at will. 

But how is it conceivable, some one may ask, tnat such 
works as are comprehended in the range of human re- 
demption should take place, systematically, under fixed 
laws? ‘To this, we answer that it is not necessary to such 
a conviction that we should be able to conceive how these 


ARE SHAPED BY HIS ENDS. 267 


operate, or what they are. All we need is to find the 
possible and probable fact; which haying found, we can 
as little doubt, or dismiss the conviction of some presiding 
law, as we can the faith of universal laws in nature, where 
we do not know the laws, or can not discover the secret 
of their action. For example, we know, in general, what 
is the law of miracles; viz., that they are wrought as 
attestations of a divine mission in those by whom they 
are wrought; but their particular occasions, times, and 
properties, why wrought by this and not by another, why 
at one time, or in one age, and not in succeeding ages, we 
may not be able to discover. The law is beyond our 
investigation, but that there is a law, and that exactly the. 
same miracles will be wrought, if wrought at all, in ex- 
actly the same conditions, or spiritual connections, even 
to eternity, we have no more room to doubt, than we have 
to question God’s intelligence. For, if God’s end is the 
same, he can never deviate or omit to do exactly the same 
things, in exactly the same circumstances, without some 
defect of intelligence. Either now, or before, he must 
confess to a mistake. If he is perfect in wisdom now, he 
was not then; if then, he is not now. But when we say 
“exactly the same circumstances,” it is important for us 
to notice the extent of the qualification; for this will 
bring into view a great principle of distinction be- 
tween the natural and the supernatural, apart from which 
the extraordinary and apparently desultory manifestations 
of the latter can not be understood. Nature is a machine, 
compounded of wheels and moved by steady powers. 
Hence it goes in rounds or cycles, returning again and 
again into itself, producing, thus, seasons, months, and 
years; repeating its dews, and showers, ana storms, and 


268 THEY OPERATE AS LAWS, 


varied temperatures; in the same circumstances, or times 
dcing much the same things. But it is not so in the 
affairs of a mind, a society, or an age. There the motion 
is never in circles, but onward, eternally onward. Noth- 
ing is ever repeated. No mind or spirit can reproduce a 
yesterday. No age, the age or even year that is past. 
The combinations of circumstances may have a certain 
analogy, but they are never the same, or even nearly so. 
If they are near enough to require a repetition, by the 
Saviour, of his miracle of the loaves, they will yet be so 
far different as to require a difference in -the miracle. 
And where the outward conditions appear to be exactly 
the same, the inward states and spiritual connections may 
be so various as to take away all resemblance; requiring 
Paul to raise a Publius out of his fever at Malta, and 
leave a Trophimus sick at Miletum. We have no argu- 
ment agains! niformity and law in such diversities; for, 
in reality, there is no recurrence of circumstances and condi- 
tions such as, at first view, might be supposed. So, if mir- 
acles appear in one age and not in another, it 1s because 
the world is moving on in a right line, reproducing ne 
conditions and circumstances of the past, but, by condi- 
tions always new, is demanding a treatment correspond- 
ently new. Hence, while the course of nature is a round 
of repetitions, the course of the supernatural repeats 
nothing, and for that reason takes an aspect of variety 
that appears even to exclude the fact of law. But it is so 
only in appearance. God’s perfect wisdom still requires 
the same things to be done in the same circumstances ; 
and, when not the same, as nearly the same as the cir- 
cumstances are nearly resembled. Every thing transpires 
iv. the uniformity of law. 


WITH ETERNAL UNIFORMITY. 269 


Thus we may assert as confidently, as if it occurred a 
hundred times a day, that a supernatural event, never 
known to occur but once, takes place under an immutable 
and really universal law; such, for example, as the great, 
world-astounding miracle of the incarnation. In exactly 
the same conditions, if they were to occur a million of 
times in the universe, (which may or may not be a vio- 
lent supposition,) precisely the same miracle also would 
recur, and that with as great certainty as the natural law 
of gravity will cause a stone to fall, when for the mil- 
lionth time its support is taken away. Living here upon 
this ant-hill, which we call the world, and seeing only the 
yard of space and the day of time our field occupies, we 
are likely to judge that an event which never occurred 
but once since the world began, must be an event apart 
from all order and system; even as a savage, but a little 
more childish than we, might imagine that some new 
deity is breaking into the world, when he sees the air- 
stone fall, because he never saw the like before. Indeed, 
we have only to look into the appearings of the Jehovah 
angel, previous to the incarnate appearing of the Word, 
noting all the approaches and gradual preparations of the 
event, to see how certainly God has a way and a law for 
it, and will not bring it to pass till the law decrees it and 
the fullness of time is come. Could we look into the his- 
tory, too, of the innumerable other worlds God has com- 
prehended in his reign, what a lesson might we thence 
derive from events counterpart to this of the incarnation, 
varied only to meet the varied conditions of their want, 
character, and destiny. Though we may not be able, 
creatures of a day, to unfold the law of this grand mira- 


sle, and reduce it to a formula of science, how little reason 
23* 


2970 THEY ARE OFTEN AS WELL KNOWN 


have we, in our inability, to question the fact of such 4 
law. , 

Besides, it is a fact that the laws of a great many of 
God’s supernatural works are made known, or discovered 
tous. Thus God dispenses the Holy Spirit by fixed laws. 
Prayer, also, is heard by laws as definite as the laws of 
equilibrium in forces. Ard what is called the doctrine 
of the Spirit and the doctrine of prayer, as given in the 
scriptures, is, in fact, nothing more nor less than the un- 
folding to us, if we could so regard it, of the laws of the 
Spirit and the laws of prayer, as pertaining to the super- 
natural kingdom of God. Indeed, there is wanting now, 
for the more intelligent guidance of christian disciples, to 
consolidate their faith and save them from the extraya- 
eances of fanaticism, a practical treatise on the laws of 
prayer, of spiritual gifts, and of the dispensation of the 
Holy Spirit generally. These two great powers, the 
hearing of prayer and the dispensing of the Spirit, are 
like the waterfalls and winds of nature, to which we set 
our wheels and lift our sails, and so, by their known laws, 
take advantage of their efficacy. A crystal, or gem, that 
is being distilled and shaped in the secret depths of the 
world, is not shaped by laws as well understood as the 
law of the Spirit of life, when it molds the secret order 
and beauty of a soul. 

Our conclusion therefore is, that all God’s works, even 
such as are most distinctly supernatural, are determined 
by fixed laws. This is true of all supernatural events, 
with the single exception of the bad and wicked actions 
of men. And these are out of all terms of law, not be 
cause they are supernatural, but only because. they are 


bad. Indeed, it ‘s a somewhat singular and even curious — 


AS THE LAWS OF NATURE. © Ze 


fuct, that while so great jealousy is felt in our time, ot 
miracles and all immediate spiritual operations of God, as 
being so many violations of order and fixed law in the 
universe, the only known events in the world, of which 
that is really true, are the bad actions of bad men, or of 
bad spirits generally. These are not subject to any fixed 
laws; they consent to no law. They are determined, nei: 
ther by the laws of causality, nor by the laws of a good 
end; which are laws of reason, truth, and beneficence. 
They have no agreement with the world, or with God, ot 
even with the constituent well-being of the doers them- 
selves. All that can be apprehended of miracles is true 
of them and even more. Their damning miracle is every 
where, and the confusion they make is real. If those per- 
sons who are so ready to apprehend some destruction, or 
implied destruction of law in the faith of miracles, would 
turn their thoughts upon these real disorders, and con- 
ceive them as the only known facts in our world that have 
no subjection to law, they would have a good point of be- 
einnine for the cure of their skepticism generally 


Jt can not be necessary to pursue this topic farther. 
But it may be well to notice, before we drop the subject, 
one or two false impressions very commonly entertained 
by the natural philosophers and poets of nature, whose 
skepticism is oftener grounded in such impressions than in 
formal arguments. They are greatly impressed by the 
immutable reign of order and law in nature, deeming it 
the highest point of sublimity, in all the known manifest- 
ations of God. Not seldom indeed is this point magnified 
by them, in terms of admiration, that reflect a certain con- 
tempt on the christian ideas of Got; as if it were possible 


272, GOD’S HIGHEST WORK 


only to an overeasy credulity, to imagine that God will 
descend from his high position of law, to do such things 
as the preaching and praying disciples of Christianity ex- 
pect of Him. Gazing into the sky, and beholding the 
eternal, changeless roll of the worlds, every orb in the 
track, where the astrologers of Babylon and Egypt saw it 
long ages ago, never to-vary or falter in the longer ages to 
come—image, how sublime, they exclaim, of the divine 
greatness! Greater and sublimer still, that the same un- 
deviating rule of law is equally conspicuous in the small- 
est things; that in every salt and pebble there is a little 
astronomy of atoms whose laws are as old as the stars, 
and whose constancy is a reflection of theirs! No, the 
wonder of God’s way is not here, but it is that he can 
make constancy flexible to so many myriads of uses, and 


the uses themselvyes—all but the abuses—-a system of or 
der and law, as complete and perfect as that of the stars 
Constancy, as a mere post, or position, has no dignity. 
The true dignity and miracle of order is constancy made 
flexible to use and expression. Sir Charles Bell had uo 
such thought as that he could magnify the beauty of God's 
way in the hand, by simply showing the curious articula- 
tions by which itis mechanically strengthened in its gripe; 
the chief wonder, the real miracle of beauty in the in- 
strument, as he well understvod, lies in its flexibility, its 
ready submission to so many and such endlessly varied 
uses. et us not be taken by the mere stability of nature, 
‘because it compliments our vanity by the easy understand. 
ing it permits. Magnitudes, weights, distances, regulari- 
ties, are not the highest symbols of God’s creative dignity. 
The glory, the true sublimity of God's architectural wis- 
Jom is that, while his work stands fast in immutable or- 


IS NOT THE WORLD OF NATURE, 273 


der, it bends so gracefully to the humblest things, without 
damage or fracture, pliant to all free action, both His and 
ours; receiving the common play of our liberty, and be- 
coming always a fluent medium of reciprocal action be- 
tween us; to Him a hand showing his handy work, or 
even a tongue which day unto day uttereth speech, and 
night unto night showeth forth knowledge of Him; to us 
the ground of our works, the instrument of our choices, 
and yet, in the order, all, of a perfect counsel and of laws 
as immutable as his throne. In this rests the doctrine of 
faith, the doctrine that justifies prayer, enables the disciple 
to believe that God can notice him, and move among 
causes to help him; raising him thus into a state of ennobled 
consciousness, how superior to the low mechanical skepti- 
cism which thinks itself dignified in the discovery that 
God, incrusted in the stiffness of his scientific order, has 
no longer any power to bend himself to man. 

The other point alluded to has reference to the compar- 
ative estimate of nature and the supernatural. Unexer- 
cised in the great world of christian thought, uninitiated 
by years of holy experience in its deep mysteries, the nat- 
aral philosopher and poet very commonly look upon the 
supernatural, or what is the same, Christianity, as com- 
prised of a few stray facts, or ghostly wonders, much less 
credible than they might be, and turn away, with a kind 
of pity, from a field so narrow, to what they call a broad- 
er and more satisfactory teaching; that of the great school 
of nature. Here is variety they say, beauty, magnifi- 
cence, greatness, and a sound, consistent order, worthy of 
God. This, they imagine, is the true revelation. 

How little do such minds conceive what the world of 
supernatural fact comprises. Go to nature for the great 


274 AND THE HIGHEST SUBJECTS 


and quickening thoughts, the wonders and broad truths! 
Call nature the grand revelation! Is it more to go to na- 
ture and k1.ow it, than to know God? Are there deeper 
depths in nature, higher sublimities, thoughts more capti- 
vating and glorious? In the mineral and vegetable shapes 
are there finer themes than in the life of Jesus? In the 
storms and gorgeous pilings of the clouds, are there man- 
ifestations of greatness and beauty more impressive than 
in the tragic sceneries of the cross? Nature is the realm 
of things, the supernatural is the realm of powers. There 
the spinning worlds return into their circles and keep re- 
turning. Here the grand life-empire of mind, society, 
truth, liberty, and holy government spreads itself in the 
view, unfolding always in changes vast, various, and di- 
vinely beneficent. There we have a Georgic, or a hymn 
of the seasons; here an epic that sings a lost Paradise. 
There God made the wheels of his chariot and set them 
rolling. Here he rides forth in it, leading his host after 
Him; vast in counsel, wonderful in working; preparing 
and marshaling all for a victory in good and blessing; 
fashioning in beauty, composing in spiritual order, and so 
gathering in the immense populations of the worlds, to be 
one realm—angels, archangels, seraphim, thrones, domin- 
ions, principalities, powers, and saits of mankind—all to 
find, in his works of guidance and new-creating grace, a 
volume of wisdom, which it will be the riches of their 
eternity to study. 
Thus we conceive, alas! too feebly, the true scale of dig- 


nity in God’s two realms. In one the order is superficial — 


and palpable. In the other it is deep as eternity, mysteri- 
ous and vast as the counsel that comprehends eternity, in 
its development. Still it is counsel, it is order, it is truth 


ARE NOT THOSE OF SCIENCE. 275 


und reason. Hven_as the Revelation of Jolin contrives, in 
so inany ways, to intimate, by the using of exact numbers 
for those which are not; in the seven angels, and seven 
trumpets, and seven vials; in the four beasts, and four and 
twenty elders; in the hundred, forty, and four thousand of 
them that are sealed; in the city, the new Jerusalem, that 
is foursquare, having its hight, length, and breadth equal; 
with twelve gates, tended by twelve angels, resting on 
twelve foundations, that are twelve manner of precious 
stones—by such images, and under such exact notations 
of arithmetic, does this man of vision put us on conceiv- 
ing, as we best can, the glorious and exact society God is 
reconstructing out of the fallen powers. We shall see it 
to be all in Jaw; settled in such terms of order, that all 
counsel, act, and joy, both his and ours, will be in terms 
of everlasting truth and reason, a realm as much more 
wonderful than nature, as liberties of mind are more diffi- 
cult to master than material quantities, 


CHAPTER X. 


THE CHARACTER OF JESUS FORBIDS HIS PCSSIBLE 
CLASSIFICATION WITH M&N. 


THE need of a supernatural, divine ministration, to 
restore the disorders of sin, is now shown; also that such 
@ ministration is compatible with the order of nature, and, 
peing in that view a rational possibility, that it may well 
be assumed as a probable expectation. In this manner 
we are brought directly up to confront the main question— 
Is the exigency met by the fact? is the supernatural divine 
ministration actually set up, and shown to be by adequate 
evidence? 

Here we raise a question, for the first time, that puts 
the christian scriptures in issue; for it is the grand pecu- 
liarity of these sacred writings, that they deal in super 
natural events and transactions, and show the fact of a 
gelestial institution finally erected on earth, in the person 
of Jesus Christ, which is called the kingdom of God or 
of heaven, and is in fact a perpetual, supernatural dispens- 
atory of healing and salvation for the race. Christianity 
is, in this view, no mere scheme of doctrine, or of ethical 
practice, but is instead a kind of miracle, a power out of 
nature and above, descending into it; a historically super: 
natural movement on the world, that is visibly entered 
into it, and organized to be an institution in the person of 
Jesus Christ. He therefore is the central figure and 
power, and with him the entire fabric either stands or 
falls. , 

To this central figure, then, we now turn ourselves; 


THE GOSPEL HISTORY, HOW USED. 277 


and, as no proof beside the light is necessary to show that 
the sun shines, so we shall find that Jesus proves himself 
by his own selftevidence. The simple inspection of his 
Ife and character will suffice to show that he can not be 
classified with mankind, (man though he be,) any more 
than what we call his miracles can be classified with mere 
natural events. The simple demonstrations of his life 
and spirit are the sufficient attestation of his own profes- 
sion, when he says—‘ I am from above”—“I came down 
from heaven.” 1 

Let us not be misunderstood. We do not assume the 
truth of the narrative by which the manner and facts of 
the life of Jesus are reported to us; for this, by the sup- 
position, is the matter in question. We only assume the 
representations themselves, as being just what they’ are, 
and discover their necessary truth in the transcendent, 
wondrously self-evident picture of divine excellence and 
beauty presented in them. We take up the account of 
Christ, in the New Testament, just as we would any other 
ancient writing, or as if it were a manuscript just brought 
to light in some ancient library. We open the book, and 
discover in it four distinct biographies of a certain remark- 
able character, called Jesus Christ. He is miraculously 
born of Mary, a virgin of Galilee, and declares, himself, 
without scruple, that he came out from God. Finding 
the supposed history made up, in great part, of his mighty 
acts, and not being disposed to believe in miracles and 
inarvels, we should soon dismiss the book as a tissue of 
absurdities too extravagant for belief, were we not struck 
with the sense of something very peculiar in the character 
of this remarkable person. Having our attention arrested 


thus by the impression made on our respect, we are put 
24 


278 THE LIFE OF JESUS BEGINS 


on inquiry, and the more we study it the more wonder- 
ful, as a character, it appears. And before we have done, 
it becomes, in fact, the chief wonder of the story; lifting 
all the other wonders into order and intelligent proportion 
round it, and making one compact and glorious wonder 
of the whole picture—a picture shining in its own clear 
sunlight upon us, as the truest of all truths—Jesus, the 
Divine Word, coming out from God, to be incarnate with 
us, and be the vehicle of God and salvation to the race. 

On the single question, therefore, of the more than 
human character of Jesus, we propose, in perfect confi- 
dence, to rest a principal argument for Christianity as a 
supernatural institution ; for, if there be in Jesus a char- 
acter which is not human, then has something broken into 
the ‘world that is not of it, and the spell of unbelief is 
broken. 

Not that Christianity might not be a supernatural insti 
tution, if Jesus were only a man; for many prophets and 
holy men, as we believe, have brought forth to the world 
communications that are not from themselves, but were 
received by inspirations from God. There are several 
grades, too, of the supernatural, as already intimated ; 
the supernatural human, the supernatural prophetic, the 
supernatural demonic and angelic, the supernatural divine. 
Christ, we shall see, is the supernatural manifested in the 
highest grade or order; viz., the divine. 


We observe, then, as a first peculiarity at the root of 
his character, that he begins life with a perfect youth. 
Tis childhood is an unspotted, and, withal, a kind of ce- 
lestial flower. The notion of a superhuman or celestial 
childhood, the most difficult of all things to be conceived, 


WITH A PERFECT CHILDHOOD. 279 


is yet successfully drawn by « few simple touches He 
is announced beforehand as “that Holy Thing;” a beau- 
tiful and powerful stroke to raise our expectation to the 
level of a nature so mysterious. In his childhood, every 
body loves him. Using words of external description, he 
is shown growing up in favor with God and man, a child 
so lovely and beautiful that heaven and earth appear to 
smile upon him together. So, when it is added that the 
child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, 
and, more than all, that the grace or beautifying power of 
God was upon him, we look, as on the unfolding of a 
sacred flower, and seem to scent a fragrance wafted on us 
from other worlds. Then, at the age of twélve, he is 
found among the great learned men of the day, the doce: 
tors of the temple, hearing what they say and asking 
them questions. And this, without any word that indi- 
cates forwardness or pertness in the child’s manner, such 
as some Christian Rabbi, or silly and ,credulous devotee, 
would certainly have added. ‘The doctors are not offended, 
as by a child too forward or wanting in modesty, they are 
only amazed that such a degree of understanding can 
dwell in one so young and simple. His mother finds him 
there among them, and begins to expostulate with him. 
His reply is very strange; it must, she is sure, have some 
deep meaning that corresponds with his mysterious birth, 
and the sense he has ever given her of a something 
strangely peculiar in his ways; and she goes home keep- 
ing his saying in her heart, and guessing vainly what his 
thought may be. Mysterious, holy secret, which this 
mother hides in her bosom, that her holy thing, her child 
whom she has watched, during the twelve years of his 
celestial childhood, now begins to speak of bemg “about 


280 HIS PERFECT CHILDHOOD 


’in words of dark enigima, which 


his Father’s business,’ 
she can not fathom. 

Now we do not say, observe, that there is one word of 
truth in these touches of narration. We only say that, 
whether they be fact or fiction, here is given the sketch 
of a perfect and sacred childhood—not of a simple, lovely, 
ingenuous, and properly human childhood, such as the 
poets love to sketch—but of a sacred and celestial child 
hood. In this respect, the early character of Jesus is a 
picture that stands by itself. In no other case, that we 
remember, has it ever entered the mind of a biographer, 
in drawing a character, to represent it as beginning with 
a spotless childhood. The childhood of the great human 
characters, if given at all, is commonly represented, ac- 
cording to the uniform truth, as being more or less con- 
trary to the manner of their mature age; and never as . 
being strictly one with it, except in those cases of inferior 
eminence where the kind of distinction attained to is that 
of some mere prodigy, and not a character of greatness 
in action, or of moral excellence. In all the higher 
ranges of character, the excellence portrayed is never the 
simple unfolding of a harmonious and perfect beauty 
contained in the germ of childhood, but it is a character 
formed by a process of rectification, in which many follies 
are mended and distempers removed; in which confidence 
is checked by defeat, passion moderated by reason, smart- 
ness sobered by experience. Commonly a certain pleas- 
ure is taken in showing how the many wayward sallies 
of the boy are, at length, reduced by discipline to the char- 
acter of wisdom, justice, and public heroism so much 
admired. 

Besides, if any writer, of almost any age, will under 


GENUINELY DESCRIBED. 28) 


take to describe, not merely a spotless, but a superhuman 
or celestial childhood, not having the reality before him, 
he must be somewhat more than human himself, if he 
does not pile together a mass of clumsy exaggerations, 
and draw and overdraw, till neither heaven nor earth 
ean find any verisimilitude in the picture. 

Neither let us omit to notice what ideas the Rabbis and 
learned doctors of this age were able, in fact, to furnish, 
when setting forth a remarkable childhood. Thus Jose 
phus, drawing on the teachings of the Rabbis, tells how 
the infant Moses, when the king of Egypt took him out 
of his daughter’s arms, and playfully put the diadem on 
his head, threw it pettishly down and stamped on it. 
And when Moses was three years old, he tells us that the 
child had grown so tall, and exhibited such a wonderful 
beauty of countenance, that people were obliged, as it 
were, to stop and look at him as he was carried along the 
road, and were held fast by the wonder, gazing till he was 
out of sight. See, too, what work is made of the child- 
hood of Jesus himself, in the Apocryphal gospels. T'hese 
are written by men of so nearly the same era, that we 
may discover, in their embellishments, what kind of a 
childhood it was in the mere invention of the time to 
make out. While the gospels explicitly say that Jesus 
wrought no miracles till his public ministry began, and 
that he made his beginning in the miracle of Cana, these 
are ambitious to make him a great prodigy in his child. 
hood. They tell how, on one occasion, he pursued, in 
his anger, the other children, who refused to play with 
him, and turned them into kids; how, on another, when 
a cnild accidentally ran against him, he was angry, and 


killed him by his mere word; how, on another, Jesus had 
a4% 


282 DISTINGUISHED FROM MEN 


a dispute with his teacher over the alphabet, and when 
the teacher struck him, how he crushed him, withered his 
arm, and threw him down dead. Finally, Joseph tells 
Mary that they must keep him within doors; for every 
body perishes against whom he is excited. His mother 
sends him to the well for water, and, having broken his 
pitcher, he brings the water in his cloak. He goes into a 
dyer’s shop, when the dyer is out, and throws all the 
cloths he finds into a vat of one color, but, when they are 
taken out, behold, they are all dyed of the precise color 
~ that was ordered. He commands a palm-tree to stoop 
down and let him pluck the fruit, and it obeys. When 
he is carried down into Egypt, all the idols fall down 
wherever he passes, and the lions and leopards gather 
round him in a harmless company. This the Gospel of 
the Infancy gives, as a picture of the wonderful childhood 
of Jesus, How unlike that holy flower of paradise, in 
the true gospels, which a few simple touches make to 
bloom im beautiful self-evidence before us! 


Passing now to the character of Jesus in his maturity, 
we discover, at once, that there is an element in it which 
distinguishes it from all human characters, viz., innocence. 
By this we mean, not that he is actually sinless; that. will 
be denied, and therefore must not here be assumed. We 
mean that, viewed externally, he is a perfectly harmless 
being, actuated by no destructive passions, gentle to infe- 
riors, doing ill or injury to none. The figure of a Lamb, 
which never was, or could be, applied to any of the great 
haman characters, without an implication of weakness 
fatal to all respect, is yet, with no such effect, applied to 
him. We associate weakness with innocence, and the 


BY HIS INNOCENCE. 283 


association 18 so powerful, that no human writer would 
undertake to sketch a great character on the basis of innv- 
cence, or would even think it possible. We predicate 
innocence of infancy, but to be a perfectly harmless, guile- 
less man, never doing ill even for a moment, we consider 
to be the same as to be a man destitute of spirit and 
manly foree. But Christ accomplished the impossible. 
Appearing in all the grandeur and majesty of a superhu- 
man manhood, he is able still to unite the impression of 
innocence, with no apparent diminution of his sublinuty. 
It is, in fact, the distinctive glory of his character, that it 
scems to be the natural unfolding of a divine innocence 
a pure celestial childhood, amplified by growth. We feel 
the power of this strange combination, but we have so 
great difficulty in conceiving it, or holding our minds to 
the conception, that we sometimes subside or descend to 
the human level, and empty the character of Jesus of the 
strange element unawares. We read, for example, his 
terrible denunciations against the Pharisees, and are 
shocked by the violent, fierce sound they have on our 
mortal lips; not perceiving that the offense is in us, and 
not in him. We should suffer no such revulsion, did we 
only conceive them bursting out, as words of indignant 
grief, from the surcharged bosom of innocence, for there 
is nothing so bitter as the offense that innocence feels, 
when stung by hypocrisy and a sense of cruelty to the 
poor. So, when he drives the money-changers from the 
temple, we are likely to leave out the only element that 
saves him from a look of violence and passion. Whereas 
it is the very point of the story, not that he, as by mere 
force, can drive so many men, but that so many are seen 
retiring before the moral power of one---a mysterious 


284 HIS RELIGIOUS CHARACIER 


being, in whose face and form the indignant flush of innu- 
cence reveals a tremendous feeling, they can no-wise com- 
prehend, much less are able to resist. 

Accustomed to no such demonstrations of vigor and 
decision in the innocent human characters, and having it 
as our way to set them down, without farther considera- 
tion, as 

“Incapable and shallow innocents,”— 

we turn the indignant fire of Jesus into a fire of malig. 
nity; whereas it should rather be conceived that Jesus here 
reveals his divinity, by what so powerfully distinguishes 
God himself, when he clothes his goodness in the tempests 
and thunders of nature. Decisive, great, and strong, 
Christ is yet all this, even the more sublimely, that he 
is invested, withal, in the lovely, but humanly feeble 
garb of innocence. And that this is the true conception, 
is clear, in the fact that no one ever thinks of him as 
weak, and no one fails to be somehow impressed with a 
sense of innocence by his life; when his enemies are 
called to show what evil or harm he hath done, they can 
specify nothing, save that he has offended their bigotry. 
Even Pilate, when he gives him up, confesses that he 
finds nothing in him to blame, and, shuddering with ap- 
prehensions he can not subdue, washes his hands to he 
clear of the innocent blood! Thus he dies, a being holy, 
harmless, undefiled. And when he hangs, a bruised 
flower drooping on his cross, and the sun above is dark, 
and the earth beneath shudders with pain, what have we 
in this funeral grief of the worlds, but a fit honor paid 
to the sad majesty of his divine innocence. 


We pass now to his religious character, whick we shall 


q 
. 


> 


7 
a a 


IS WITHOUT REPENTANCE. 285 


discover, has the remarkable distinction that 1t proceeds 
from a point exactly opposite to that which is the root, or 
radical element in the religious character of men. Human 
piety begins with repentance. It is the effort of a being, 
implicated in wrong and writhing under the stings of 
guilt, to come unto God. The most nghteous, or even 
self-righteous, men blend expressions of sorrow and vows 
of new obedience with their exercises. But Christ, in the 
character given him, never acknowledges sin. It is the 
grand peculiarity of his piety, that he never regrets any 
thing that he has done or been; expresses, nowhere, a 
single feeling of compunction, or the least sense of un- 
worthiness. On the contrary, he boldly challenges his 
accusers, in the question—Which of you convinceth me 
of sin? and even declares, at the close of his life, in a 
solemn appeal to God, that he has given to men, unsullied, 
the glory divine that was deposited in him. 

Now the question is not whether Christ was, in fact, 
the faultless being, assumed, in his religious character. AI] 
we have to notice here is that he makes the assumption, 
makes it not only in words, but in the very tenor of his 
exercises themselves, and that by this fact his piety is 
radically distinguished from all human piety. And no 
mere human creature, it is certain, could hold. such a 
religious attitude, without shortly displaying faults that 
would cover him with derision, or excesses and delinquen- 
cies that would even disgust his friends. Piety without 
pne dash of repentance, one ingenuous confession of 
wrong, one tear, one look of contrition, one request to 
heaven for pardon-—let any one of mankind try this kind 
ox piety, and see how long it will be ere his righteousness 
will prove itself to be the most impudent conceit; how 


A : 
286 HE UNITES OPPOSITES, 


long, before his passions, sobered by no contrition, his 
pride kept down by no repentance, will tempt him into 
absurdities that will turn his pretenses to mockery, No 
sooner does any one of us begin to be self-righteous, than 
he begins to fall into outward sins that shame his conceit, 
But, in the case of Jesus, no such disaster follows. Begin- 
ving with an impenitent; or unrepentant piety, he holds it 
to the end, and brings no visible stain upon it. 

Now, one of two things must be true. He was either 
sinless, or he was not. If sinless, what greater, more pal- 
pable exception to the law of human development, than 
that a perfect and stainless being has for once lived in the 
flesh! If not, which is the supposition required of those 
who deny every thing above the range of human devel- 
opment, then we have a man taking up a religion without 
repentance, a religion not human, but celestial, a style of 
piety never taught him in his childhood, and never con- 
ceived or attempted among men—more than this, a style 
of piety, withal, wholly unsuited to his real character as 
a sinner, holding it as a figment of insufferable presump- 
tion to the end of life, and that in a way of such unfalter- 
ing grace and beauty, as to command the universal hom- 
age of the human race! Could there be a wider deviation 
from all we know of mere human development? 


He was also able perfectly to unite elements of charac- 
ter, that others find the greatest difficulty in uniting, how: 
ever unevenly and partially. He is never said to have 
laughed, and yet he never produces theimpression of aus- 
terity, moroseness, sadness, or even of being unhappy. 
On the contrary, he is described as one that appears to be 
commonly filled with a sacred joy; ‘rejoicing in spirit,” 


AS NO HUMAN SAINT EVER DORKS. 287 


aud leaving to his disciples, in the hour of his departure, 
the bequest of his joy—‘that they might have my joy 
fulfilled in themselves.” We could not long endure 4 
human being whose face was never moved by laughter, 
or relaxed by a gladdening smile. What sympathy could 
we have with one who appears, in this manner, to have 
ny human heart? We could not even trust him. And 
yet we have sympathy with Christ; for there is some: 
where in him an ocean of deep joy, and we see that he is, 
in fact, only burdened with his sympathy for us to such a 
degree, that his mighty life is overcast and oppressed by 
the charge he has undertaken. His lot is the lot of pri- 
vation, he has no powerful friends, he has not even where 
to lay his head. No human being could appear in such a 
guise, without occupying us much with the sense of his 
affliction. We should be descending to him, as it were, 
in pity. But we never pity Christ, never think of him 
as struggling with the disadvantages of a lower level, to 
rise above it. In fact, he does not allow us, after all, to 
think much of his privations. We think of him more as 
a being of mighty resources, proving himself, only the 
more sublimely, that he is in the guise of destitution. 
He is the most unworldly of beings, having no desire at 
all for what the earth can give, impossible to be caught 
with any longing for its benefits, impassible even to its 
charms, and yet there is no ascetic sourness or repugnance, 
no misanthropic distaste in his manner; av if he were 
bracing himself against the world to keep it off. The 
more closely he is drawn to other worlds, the more fresh 
and susceptible is he to the humanities of this. The little 
child is an image of gladness, which his. heart leaps forth 
to embrace. ‘The wedding and the feast and the funeral 


288 HIS ASTONISHING PRETENSIONS 


have all their cord of sympathy in his bosom. At the 
wedding he is clothed in congratulation, at the feast im 
doctrine, at the funeral in tears; but no miser was ever 
drawn to his money, with a stronger desire, than he to 
worlds above the world. Men undertake to be spiritval, 
and they become ascetic ; or, endeavoring to hold a liberal 
view of the comforts and pleasures of society, they are 
soon buried in the world, and slaves to its fashions; or, 
holding a scrupulous watch to keep out every particular 
sin, they become legal, and fall out of liberty ; or, charmed 
with the noble and heavenly liberty, they run to negli- 
gence and irresponsible living; so the earnest become 
violent, the fervent fanatical and censorious, the gentle 
waver, the firm turn bigots, the liberal grow lax, the be- 
nevolent ostentatious. Poor human infirmity can hold 
nothing steady. Where the pivot of righteousness is 
broken, the scales must needs slide off their balance. 
Indeed, it is one of the most difficult things which a cul- 
tivated christian can attempt, only to sketch a theoretic 
view of character, in its true justness and proportion, so 
that a little more study, or a little more self-experience, 
will not require him to modify it. And yet the character 
of Christ is never modified, even by a shade of rectifica 
tion. It is one and the same throughout. He makes no 
jmprovements, prunes no extravagances, returns from no 
eccentricities. The balance of his character is never dis- 
turbed, or readjusted, and the astounding assumption on 
‘which it is based is never shaken, even by a suspicion 
that he falters in it. 


There is yet another point related to this, in whicn the 
attitude of Jesus is even more distinct from any that was 


ARE FULLY SUPPORTED. 289 


ever taken by man, and is yet triumphantly sustained. 1] 
speak of the astonishing pretensions asserted coucerning 
his person. Similar pretensions have sometimes been as: 
sumed by maniacs, or insane persons, but never, so far as 
I know, by persons in the proper exercise of their reason. 
Certain it is that no mere man could take the same atti- 
tude of supremacy toward the race, and inherent affinity or 
oneness with God, without fatally shocking the confidence — 
of the world by his effrontery. Imagine a human crea- 
ture saying to the world—‘“T came forth from the Father” 
—*‘ye are from beneath, I am from above;” facing all the 
intelligence and even the philosophy of the world, and 
saying, in bold assurance—‘ behold, a greater than Solo- 
mon is here”—“T am the light of the world”—“ the way, 
the truth, and the life;” publishing to all peoples and re- 
ligions—‘*No man cometh to the Father, but by me;” 
promising openly in his death—‘“I will draw all men 


7 


unto me;” addressing the Infinite Majesty, and testifying 
—‘T have glorified thee on the earth;” calling to the 
human race—‘‘Come unto me,” “follow me;” laying his 
hand upon all the dearest and most intimate affections of 
hfe, and demanding a precedent love—“he that loveth 
father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.” 
Was there ever displayed an example of effrontery and 
spiritual conceit so preposterous? Was there ever a man 
that dared put himself on the world in such pretensions? 
—as if ull light was in him, as if to follow him and be 
worthy of him was to be the conclusive or chief excel- 
lence of mankind! What but mockery and disgust doeg 
he challenge as the certain reward of his audacity! But 
no one is offended with Jesus on this account, and what 


is a sure test of his success. it is remarkable that, of all 
2 


290 HIS ASTONISHING PRETENSIONS 


the readers of the gospel, it probably never even occurs 
to one in a hundred. thousand, to blame his conceit, or 
the egregious vanity of his pretensions. 

Nor is there any thing disputable in these pretensions, 
least of all, any trace of myth or fabulous tradition. 
They enter into the very web of his ministry, so that if 
they are extracted and nothing left transcending mere hu- 
manity, nothing at all is left. Indeed there is a tacit as- 
sumption, continually maintained, that far execeds the 
range of these formal pretensions. He says—’ I and the 
Father that sent me.” What figure would a man present 
in such language—I and the Father? He goes even be- 
yond this, and apparently without any thought of excess 
or presumption, classing himself with the infinite Majesty 
in a common plural, he says—‘ We will. come unto him, 
and make owr abode with him.” Imagine any, the great- 
est and holiest of mankind, any prophet, or apostle, saying 
we, of himself and the Great Jehovah! What a concep- 
tion did he give us concerning himself, when he assumed 
the necessity of such information as this—‘‘my Father is 
ereater than I;” and above all, when he calls himself, as 
he often does, in a tone of condescension—“the Son of 
Man.” See him also on the top of Olivet, looking down 
on the guilty city and weeping words of compassion like 
these—-Imagine some man weeping over London or New 
York, in the hke—“ How often would I have gathered 
thy children together as a hen doth gather her chickens 
under her wings, and ye would not!” See him also in the 
supper, instituting a rite of remembrance for himself, a 
scorned, outcast man, and saying—‘‘this is my body”— 
“this do in remembrance of me.” 

I have dwelt thus on the transcendent pretensions of 


ARE FULLY SUPPORTED. 291 


Jesus, because there is an argument here for his superliu 
mauity, which can not be resisted. For eighteen hundred 
years, these prodigious assumptions have been published 
und preached to a world tkat is quick to lay hold of con: 
ceit, and bring down the lofty airs of pretenders, and yet, 
during all this time, whole nations of people, compcsing 
as well the learned and powerful as the ignorant and hum- 
ble, have paid their homage to the name of Jesus, detect- 
_ ing never any disagreement between his merits and his 
pretensions, offended never by any thought of his extrav- 
agance. In which we have absolute proof that he practi- 
cally maintains his amazing assumptions! Indeed it will 
even be found that, in the common apprehension of the 
race, he maintains the merit of a most peculiar modesty, 
producing no conviction more distinctly, than that of his 
intense lowliness and humility. His worth is seen to be 
s0 great, his authority so high, his spirit so celestial, that 
instead of being offended by his pretensions, we take the 
-Impression, of one in whom it is even a condescension to 
breathe our air. I say not that his friends and followers 
take this impression, it 1s received as naturally and irre- 
sistibly by unbelievers. I do not recollect any skeptic, or 
infidel who has even thought to accuse him as a conecited 
person, or to assault him in this, the weakest and absurd- 
est, if not the strongest and holiest, point of his character. 
Come now, all ye that tell us in your wisdum of the 
mere natural humanity of Jesus, and help us to fnd how 
it is, that he is only a natural development of the human; 
select your best and wisest character; take the range, if 
you will, of all the great philosophers and saints; and 
choose out one that is most competent; or if, perchance, 
some one of you may imagine that he is himself about 


292 HE EXCELS IN THE PASSIVE, 


upon a level with Jesus, (as we hear that sonie of you do,) 
let him come forward in this trial and say—‘ follow me”—- 
“be worthy of me”—“T am the light of the world” —“ye 
are from beneath, Iam from above”——‘‘behold a greater 
than Solomon is here;” take on all these transcendent as- 
sumptions, and see how soon your glory will be sifted out 
of you by the detective gaze, and darkened by the con- 
tempt of mankind! Why not; is not the challenge fair? 
Do you not tell us that you can say as divine things as 
he? Is it not in you too, of course, to do what is human? 
are you not in the front rank of human developments? do 
you not rejoice in the power to rectify many mistakes 
and errors in the words of Jesus? Give us then this one 
experiment, and see if it does not prove to you a truth that 
is of some consequence; viz., that you are a man, and 
that Jesus Christ is—more. 


But there is also a passive side to the character of Je- 
sus, which is equally peculiar and which also demands 
our attention. I recollect no really great character in his- 
tory, excepting such as may have been formed under 
Christianity, that can properly be said to have united the 
passive virtues, or to have considered them any essential 
part of a finished character. Socrates comes the nearest 
to such an impression, and therefore most resembles Christ 
in the submissiveness of his death. It does not appear, 
however, that his mind had taken this turn previously to 
his trial, and the submission he makes to the public sen- 
tence is, in fact, a refusal only to escape from the prison 
surreptitiously; which he does, partly because he thinks 
it the duty of every good citizen not to break the laws. 
and partly, if we judge from his manner, because he is 


AS IN THE AUTIVE VIRTUES. 293 


detained by a subtle pride, as if it were something unwor-. 
thy of a grave philosopher, to be stealing away, as a fugi- 
tive, from the laws and tribunals of his country. The 
Stoics indeed have it for one of their great principles, that 
the true wisdom of life consists in a passive power, viz., in 
being able to bear suffering rightly. But they mean by 
this the bearing of suffering so as not to feel it; a stecling of 
the mind against sensibility, and a raising of the will into 
such power as to drive back the pangs of life, or shake 
them off. But this, in fact, contains no allowance of pas- 
sive virtue at all; on the contrary, it is an attempt so to 
exalt the active powers, as to even exclude every sort of 
passion, or passivity. And Stoicism corresponds, in this 
respect, with the -general sentiment of the world’s great 
characters. They are such as like to see things in the he- 
roic vein, to see spirit and courage breasting themselves 
against wrong, and, where the evil can not be escaped by 
resistance, dying in a manner of defiance. Indeed it has 
been the impression of the world generally, that patience, 
gentleness, readiness to suffer wrong without resistance, is 
but another name for weakness. 

But Christ, in opposition to all such impressions, man- 
ages to connect these non-resisting and gentle passivities 
with a character of the severest grandeur and majesty; 
and, what is more, convinces us that no truly great char- 
acter can exist without them. 

Observe him, first, in what may be called the common 
trials of existence. For if you will put a character to the 
severest of all tests, see whether it can bear, without fal- 
tering, the little, common ills and hindrances of life, 
Many aman will goto his martyrdom, with a spirit of 


firmness ard heroic composure, whom a little weariness or 
25% 


294 HE IS NEVER DISCOMPOSED 


nervous exhaustion, some silly prejudice, or capricious 
opposition, would, for the moment, throw into a fit of vex- 
ation, or ill-nature. Great occasions rally great principles, 
and brace the mind to a lofty bearing, a bearing that is 
even above itself. But trials that make no occasion at all, 
leave it to show the goodness and beauty it has in its own 
disposition. And here precisely is the superhuman glory 
of Christ as a character, that he is just as perfect, exhibits 
just as great a spirit, in little trials as in great ones. In 
all the history of his life, we are not able to detect the 
faintest indication that he slips or falters. And this is 
the more remarkable, that he is prosecuting so great a 
work, with so great enthusiasm; counting it his meat and 
drink, and pouring into it all the energies of his life. For 
when men have great works on hand, their very enthusi- 
asm runs to impatience. When thwarted or unreasonably 
hindered, their soul strikes fire against the obstacles they 
meet, they worry themselves at every hindrance, every 
disappointment, and break out in stormy and fanatical 
violence. But Jesus, for some reason, is just as even, just. 
as serene, in all his petty vexations, and hindrances, as if 
he had nothing on hand todo. A kind of sacred patience 
invests him every where. Having no element of crude 
will mixed with his work, he is able, in all trial and oppo- 
sition, to hold a condition of serenity above the clouds, 
and let them sail under him, without ever obscuring the 
sun. He is poor, and hungry, and weary, and clespised, 
insulted by his enemies, deserted by his friends, but never 
disheartened, never fretted or ruffled. You see, meantime, 
that he is no stoic; he visibly feels every such ill as his 
delicate and sensitive nature must, but he has some sacred 
and sovereign good present, to mingle with his pains, 


KY HINDRANCES AND TRIALS. 295 


Which, as it were naturally and without any self-watching, 
allays them. He does not seem to rule his temper, but 
rather to have none; for temper, in the sense of passion, 
is a fury that follows the will,as the lightnings follow the 
disturbing forces of the winds among the clouds, and ae: 
cordingly where there is no self-will to roll up the clouds 
and hurl them through the sky, the lightnings hold their 
equilibrium and are as though they were not. 

As regards what is called pre-eminently his passion, the 
scene of martyrdom that closes his life, it is easy to distin- 
guish a character in it which separates it from all. mere 
human martyrdoms. Thus, it will be observed, that his 
agony, the scene in which his suffering is bitterest and 
most evident, is, on human principles, wholly misplaced, 
It comes before the time, when as yet there is no arrest, 
and no human prospect that there will be any. He is at 
large to go where he pleases, and in perfect outward safety. 
Fis disciples have just been gathered round him in a scene 
of more than family tenderness and affection. Indeed it is 
but avery few hours since that he was coming into the city, 
at the head of a vast procession, followed by loud acclama- 
tions, and attended by such honors as may fitly celebrate the 
inaugural of a king. Yet here, with no bad sign apparent, 
we sce him plunged into a scene of deepest distress, and 
racked, in his feeling, with a more than mortal agony. 
Coming out of this, assured and comforted, he is shortly 
arrested, brought to trial, and crucified; where, if there be 
any thing questionable in his manner, it is in the fact that 
lie is even more composed than some would have him to 
‘be, not even stooping to defend himself or vindicate his in- 
nocence. And when he dies, it is not as when the mar. 
tyts die. ‘They die for what they have said, and remain 


296 HIS AGONY NOT HUMAN. 


ing silent will not recant. He dics for what he has not 
said, and still is silent. 
- By the misplacing of his agony thus, and the strange 
silence he observes when the real hour of agony is come, 
we are put entirely at fault on natural principles. But it 
was not for him to wait, as being only.a man, till he is 
arrested and the hand of death is before him, then to be 
nerved by the occasion to a show of victory. He that 
was before Abraham, must also be before his occasions. 
In a time of safety, in a cool hour vw retirement, unac: 
countably to his friends, he falls into a dreadful contest 
and struggle of mind; coming out of it, finally, to go 
through his most horrible tragedy of crucifixion, with the 
serenity of a spectator! 

Why now this so great intensity of sorrow? why this 
agony? Was there not something unmanly in it, some: 
thing unworthy of « really great soul? Take him to be 
only a man, and there probably was; nay, if he were a 
woman, the same might be said. But this one thing is 
clear, that no one of mankind, whether man or woman, 
ever had the sensibility to suffer so intensely; even show- 
ing the body, for the mere struggle and pain of the mind, 
exuding and dripping with blood. Evidently there is 
something mysterious here; which mystery is vehicle to 
dur feeling, and rightfully may be, of something divine. 
What, we begin to ask, should be the power of a superhu- 
man sensibility? and how far should the human vehicle 
shake under such a power? How too should an innocent 
and pure spirit be exercised, when about to suffer, in his 
own person, the greatest wrong ever committed? 

Besides there is a vicarious spirit in Jove; all love in- 
serts itself vicariously into the sufferings and woes and, in 


HIS PASSION A MYSTERY. 297 


a certain serse, the sins of others, taking them on itself as 
a burden. How then, if perchance Jesus should be di: 
vine, an embodiment of God’s love in the world—how 
should he feel, and by what signs of feeling manifest his 
sensibility, when a fallen race are just about to do the 
damning sin that crowns their guilty history; to crucify 
the only perfect being that ever came into the world; to 
crucify even him, the messenger and representative to them 
of the love of God, the deliverer who has taken their case 
and cause upon him! Whosoever duly ponders these 
questions, will find that he is led away, more and more, 
from any supposition ef the mere mortality of Jesus. 
W hat he looks upon, he will more and more distinctly see 
to be the pathology of a superhuman anguish. -It stands, 
he will perceive, in no mortal key. It will be to him the 
anguish, visibly, not of any pusillanimous feeling, but of 
holy character itself; nay, of a mysteriously transcendent, 
or somehow divine, character. 

But why did he not defend his cause and justify his in- 
nocence in the trial? Partly because he had the wisdom 
to see that there really was and could be no trial, and that 
one who undertakes to plead with a mob, only mocks his 
own virtue, throwing words into the air that is already 
filled with the clamors of prejudice. Tu vlead innocence 
in such a case, is only to make a protestation, such as indi- 
cates fear, and is really unworthy of a great and composed 
spimt. A man would have done it, but Jesus did not, 
Besides, there was a plea of innocence, in the manner of 
Jesus and the few very significant words that he dropped. 
that had an effect on the mind of Pilate, more searching 
and powerful than any formal protestations. And the 
more we study the conduct of Jesus during the whole 


298 HIS UNDERTAKING 


scene, the more shall we be satisfied that he said enough; 
the more admire the mysterious composure, the wisdom, 
the self-possession, and the superhuman patience of the 
sufferer. It was visibly the death scene of a transcendent 
love. He dies not as aman, but rather as some one might, 
who is mysteriously more and higher. So thought aloud 
the hard-faced soldier—‘ Truly this was the Son of God.” 
As if he had said—‘TI have seen men die—this is not a 
man. ‘They call him Son of God—he can not be less,” 
Can he be less to us? 


But Christ shows himself to be a superhuman character, 
not in the personal traits only, exhibited in his life, but 
even more sublimely in the undertakings, works, and 
teachings by which he proved his Messiahship. 

Consider then the reach of his undertaking; whicn, if 
he was only a man, shows him to have been the most ex- 
travagant and even wildest of all human enthusiasts. Con- 
trary to every religious prejudice of his nation and even 
of his time, contrary to the comparatively narrow and ex- 
clusive religion of Moses itself and to all his training 
under it, he undertakes to organize a kingdom of God, or 
kingdom of heaven on earth. His purpose includes a new 
moral creation of the race—not of the Jews only and of men, 
proselyted to their covenant, but of the whole human 
race. He declared thus, at an early date in his ministry, 
that many shall come from the east and the west and sit 
down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the king: 
dom of God; that the field is the world; and that God so 
loves the world, as to give for it his only begotten Son. 
We also declared that his gospel shall be published to 
all nations, and gave his apostles their commission, to 


1S NOT HUMAN. 299 


go into all the world and publish his gospel to every 
creature. 

Here then we have the grand idea of his mission- —it ig 
to new-create the human race and restore it to God, in the 
unity of a spiritual kingdom. And upon this single fact, 
Reinhard erects a complete argument for his extra-human 
character; going into a formal review of all the great 
founders of states and most celebrated lawgivers, the great 
heroes and defenders of nations, all the wise kings and 
statesmen, all the philosophers, all the prophet founders of 
religions, and discovering as a fact that no such thought 
as this, or nearly proximate to this, had ever before been 
taken up by any living character in history; showing also 
how it had happened to every other great character, how- 
ever hberalized by culture, to be limited in some way to. 
the interest of his own people, or empire, and set in oppo- 
sition, or antagonism, more or less decidedly, to the rest of 
the world. But to Jesus alone, the simple Galilean car- 
penter, it happens otherwise; that, having never seen a 
map of the world in his whole life, or heard the name of 
half the great nations on it, he undertakes, coming out 
of his shop, a scheme as much vaster and more diffi- 
cult than that of Alexander, as it proposes more and what 
is more divinely benevolent! This thought of a universal 
kingdom, cemented in God—why, the immense Romar. 
Hmpire of his day, constructed by so many ages of war 
and conquest, is a bauble in comparison, both as regards 
the extent and the cost! And yet the rustic tradesman of 
Galilee propounds even this for his errand, and ‘that in a 
way of assurance, as simple and quiet, as if the immense 
reach of his plan were, in fact, a matter to him of no con: 
sideration. 


—_— 


800 BUT HIS CONFIDENUE 


Nor is this all, there is included in his plan, what,-te any 
mere man, would be yet more remote from the possible 
confidence of his frailty; it is a plan as universal in time, 
as it is in the scope of its objects. It does not expect to 
be realized in a life-time, or even in many centuries ta 
come. He calls it, understandingly, his grain of mus- 
tard seed; which, however, is to grow, he declares, and 
overshadow the whole earth. But the courage of Jesus, 
counting a thousand years to be only a single day, is equal 
to the run of his work. He sees a rock of stability, where 
men see only frailty and weakness. Peter himself, the im- 
pulsive and always unreliable Peter, turns into rock and 
_ becomes a great foundation, as he looks upon him. “On 
this rock,” he says, “I will build my church, and the gates 
of hell shall not prevail against it.” His expectation toc 
reaches boldly out beyond his own death; that in fact is te 
be the seed of his great empire— except a corn of wheat 
fall into the ground and die, it abideth,” he says, “alone.” 
And if we will see with what confidence and courage he 
adheres to his plan, when the time of his death approach- 
es—how far he is from giving it up as lost, or as an ex- 
ploded vision of his youthful enthusiasm—we have only 
to observe his last interview with the two sisters of Beth- 
any, in whose hospitality he was so often comforted. 
When the box of precious ointment is broken upon his 
head, which Judas reproves as a useless expense, he dis- 
covers a sad propriety, or even prophecy, in what the 
Woman has done, as connected with his death, now at 
hand. But it does not touch his courage, we per- 
ceive, or the confidence of his plan, or even cast a shade 
on his prospect. “Let her alone. She hath done what 
she could. She is come aforehand’ to anoint my body te 


NEVER FALTERS. 301 


the burying. Verily I say unto you, wheresoever this 
gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, tbis 
also that this woman hath done shall be told for a memo: 
rial of her.” Such was the sublime confidence he had in 
a plan taat was to run through all future ages, and would 
scarcely begin to show its fruit during his own life time. 

Is this great idea then, which no man ever before con- 
ceived, the raising of the whole human race to God, a plan 
sustained with such evenness of courage, and a confidence 
of the world’s future so far transcending any human ex- 
ample—is this a human development? Regard the be- 
nevolence of it, the universality of it, the religious grand- 
eur of it, as a work readjusting the relations of God and 
his government with men—the cost, the length of time it 
will cover, and the far off date of its completion—is it in 
this scale that a Nazarene carpenter, a poor uneducated 
villager, lays out his plans and graduates the confidence 
of his undertakings? There have been great enthusiasts 
in the world, and they have shown their infirmity by luna- 
tic airs, appropriate to their extravagance. But it is not 
human, we may safely affirm, to lay out projects transcend- 
ing all human ability, like this of Jesus, and which can 
not be completed in many thousands of years, doing it in 
all the airs of sobriety, entering on the performance with- 
out parade, and yielding life to it firmly as the inaugural 
of its triumph. No human creature sits quietly down to 
a perpetual project, one that proposes to be executed only 
at the end, or final harvest of the world. That is not 
human, but divine. 


Passing now to what is more interior in his ministry 
taken ag a revelation of his character, we are struck with 
26 


802 HIS EXPECTATION 


another distinction: viz., that he takes rank with the poor 
and grounds all the immense expectations of his cause on 
a beginning made with the lowly and dejected classes of 
the world. He was born to the lot of the poor. His 
manners, tastes, and intellectual attainments, however, 
visibly outgrew his condition, and that in such a degree 
that, if he had been.a mere human character, he must 
have suffered some painful distaste for the kind of society 
in which he lived. The great, as we perceive, flocked to 
hear him, and sometimes eame even by night to receive 
his instructions. He saw the highest circles of society and 
influence open to him, if he only desired to enter them. 
And, if he was a properly human character, what virtuous, 
but rising young man would have had a thought of im- 
propriety, in accepting the elevation within his reach; con- 
sidering it as the proper reward of his industry and the 
merit of his character—not to speak of the contempt for 
his humble origin, and his humble associates, which every 
upstart person of only ordinary virtue 1s so commonly 
seen to manifest. Still he adheres to the poor, and makes 
them the object of his ministry. And what is more pecu- 
liar, he visibly has a kind of interest in their society, 
which is wanting in that of the higher classes; perceiving, 
apparently, that they have a certain aptitude for receiving 
right impressions, which the others have not. They are 
not the wise and prudent, filled with the conceit of learn- 
ing and station, but they are the ingenuous babes of 
poverty, open to conviction, prepared, by their humble 
lot, to receive thoughts and doctrines in advance of their 
age. ‘Therefore he loves the poor, and, without descend- 
mg to their low manners, he delights to be identified with 
them. He is more assiduous in their service than other 


“1S IN THE POOR. | 808 


men have been in serving the great. He goes about on 
foot, teaching them and healing their sick; occupying his 
great and elevated mind, for whole years, with details of 
labor and care, which the nurse of no hospital had ever 
laid upon him—insanities, blind eyes, fevers, fluxes, lep- 
rosies, and sores. His patients are all below his level 
and unable to repay him, even by a breath of congenial 
sympathy; and nothing supports him hut the conscious: 
ness of good which attends his labors. 

Meantime, consider what contempt for the poor had 
hitherto prevailed, among all the great statesmen and phil- 
anthropists of the world. The poor were not society, or 
any part of society. They were only the conveniences 

and drudges of society; appendages of luxury and state, 
tools of ambition, material to be used in the wars. No 
man who had taken up the idea of some great change or 
reform in society, no philosopher who had conceived the 
notion of building up an ideal state or republic, ever 
thought of beginning with the poor. Influence was seen 
to reside in the higher classes, and the only hope of reach- 
ing the world, by any scheme of social regeneration, was 
to begin with them, and through them operate its results. 
But Christ, if we call him a philosopher, and, if he is only 
aman, we can call him by no higher name, was the poor 
man’s philosopher; the first and only one that had ever 
appeared. Seeing the higher circles open to him, and 
tempted to imagine that, if he could once get footing for his 
doctrine among the influential and the great, he should 
thus secure his triumph more easily, he had yet no such 
thought. He laid his foundations, as it were, below all 
influence, and, as men would judge, threw himself away, 
And precisely here did he display a wisdom and a charac- 


B04 HE BECOMES THEIR PATRON, 


ter totally in advance of hisage. Eighteen centuries have 
passed away, and we now seem just beginning to under. 
stand the transcendent depth of this feature in his mission 
and his character. We appear to be just waking up to it 
as a discovery, that the blessing and upraising of the 
masses are the fundamental interest of society—a discov- 
ery, however, which is only a proof that the life of Jesus 
has at length, begun to penetrate society and public his- 
tory. It is precisely this which is working so many and 
great changes in our times, giving liberty and right to the 
enslaved many, seeking their education, encouraging their 
efforts by new and better hopes, producing an aversion to 
war, which has been the fatal source of their misery and 
depression, and opening, as we hope, a new era of comfort, 
light, and-virtue in the world. It is as if some higher and 
better thought had visited our race—which higher thought 
is in the life of Jesus. The schools of all the philosophers 
are gone, hundreds of years.ago, and all their visions have 
died away into thin air; but the poor man’s philosopher 
still lives, bringing up his poor to liberty, light, and char. 
acter and drawing the nations on to a brighter and better 
day. 


At the same time, the more than human character ol 
Jesus is displayed also in the fact that, identifying himself 
thus with the poor, he is yet able to do it, without elicit- 
ing any feelings of partisanship in them. To one who 
will be at the pains to reflect a little, nothing will seem 
more difficult than this; to become the patron of a class, 
a down-trodden and despised class, without rallying in 
them a feeling of intense malicnity. And that for the 
reason, partly, that no patron, however just or magnar- 


BUT WILL NOT HAVE THEM PARTISANS, 808 


imous, is ever quite able to suppress the feelings of a par- 
tisan in himself. A little ambition, pricked on by a littie 
abuse, a faint desire of popularity playing over the face 
of his benevolence, and tempting him to loosen a little of 


ill-nature, as tinder to the passions of his sect—something 
of this kind is sure to kindle some fire of malignity in his 
clients. 

Besides, men love to be partisans. Even Paul and 
Apollos and Peter had their sects, or schools, glorying in 
one against another. With all their efforts, they could 
not suppress a weakness so contemptible. But no such 
feeling could ever get footing under Christ. If his disci- 
ples had forbidden one to heal in the name of Jesus, be- 
cause he followed not with them, he gently rebuked them, 
and made them feel that he had larger views than to suffer 
any such folly. As the friend of the poor and oppressed 
class, he set himself openly against their enemies, and chas- 
tised them as oppressors, with the most terrible rebukes. 
He exposed the absurdity of their doctrine, and silenced 
them in argument; he launched his thunderbolts against 
their base hypocrisies; but it does not appear that the pop- 
-ulace ever testified their pleasure, even by a cheer, or 
gave vent to any angry emotion under cover of his lead- 
ership. For there was something still, in the manner and 
air of Jesus, which made them feel it to be inappropriate, 
and even made it impossible. It was as if some, being 
were here, taking their part, whom it were even an irrev- 
erence to applaud, much more to second by any partisan 
clamor. They would as soon have thought of cheering 
the angel in the sun, or of rallying under him as the head 
of their faction. On one occasion, when he had fed the 


multitudes by a miracle, he saw that their national super- 
; 26* 


806 THE DERFECT ORIGINALITY 


stitfons were excited, and that, regarding him as the Mes- 
siali predicted in the scriptures, they were about to take 
him by force and make him their king; but this was a 
national feeling, not the feeling of a class. Its root was 
superstition, not hatred. His triumphal entry into Jeru 
salem, attended by the acclamations of the multitude, if 
this be not one of the fables or myths, which our modern 
criticism rejects, is yet no demonstration of popular fae- 
tion, or party animosity. Robbing it of its mystical and 
miraculous character, as the inaugural of the Messiah, it 
has no real signification. In a few hours, after all, these 
hosannas are hushed. Jesus is alone and forsaken, and 
the very multitudes he might seem to have enlisted, are 
erying, “Crucify him!” On the whole, it can not be said 
that Jesus was ever popular. He was followed, at times, 
by great multitudes of people, whose love of the marvel- 
ous worked on their superstitions, to draw them after him. 
They came also to be cured of their diseases. They knew 
him as their friend. But there was yet something in him 
that forbade their low and malignant feelings gathering 
into a conflagration round him. He presents, indeed, an 
instance that stands alone in history, as God at the sum- 
mit of the worlds, where a person has identified himself 
with a class, without creating a faction, and without be. 
coming a popular character. 


Consider him next as a teacher; his method and man- 
ner, and the other characteristics of his excellence, apart 
from his doctrine. That will be distinctly considered in 
another place. 

First of all, we notice the perfect originality and inde 
pendence of his teaching. We have a great many men 


OF HIS TEACHING. 807 


who are original, in the sense of being originators, within 
a certain boundary of educated thought. But the crigin- 
ality of Christ 1s uneducated. That he draws ncthing 
from the stores of learning, can be seen at a glance. The 
impression we have in reading his instructions, justifies 
to the letter, the language of his cotemporaries, when 
they say, “this man hath never learned.” There is nothing 
in any of his allusions, or forms of speech, that indicates 
learning. Indeed, there is nothing in him that belongs 
to his age or country—no one opinion, or taste, or preju: 
dice. The attempts that have been made, in a way of 
establishing his mere natural manhood, to show that he 
borrowed his sentiments from the Persians and the eastern 
forms of religion, or that he had been intimate with the 
HKssenes and borrowed from them, or that he must have 
been acquainted with the schools and religions of Egypt, 
all attempts of the kind 
have so palpably failed, as not even to require a deliberate 


deriving his doctrine from them 


answer. If he is simply a man, as we hear, then he is 
most certainly a new and singular kind of man, never 
before heard of, one who visibly is quite as great a miracle 
in the world as if he were not a man. We can see for 
ourselves, in the simple directness and freedom of his 
teachings, that whatever he advances is from himself. 
Shakspeare, for instance, whom we name as being proba- 
bly the most creative and original spirit the world has 
ever produced, one of the class, too, that are called self- 
made men, is yet tinged, in all his works, with human 
learning. His glory is, indeed, that so much of what is 
great in history and historic character, lives and appears 
in his dramatic creations. He is the high-priest, we some: 
times hear, of human nature. Dut Christ, understanding 


308 NO DIALECTICS, NO ART. 


human nature so as to address it more skillfully than he, 
derives no help from historic examples. He is the high- 
priest, rather, of the divine nature, speaking as one that 
has come out from God, and has nothing to borrow from 
the world. It is not to be detected, by any sign, that the 
human sphere in which he moved imparted any thing to 
him. His teachings are just as full of divine nature, as 
Shakspeare’s of human. 

Neither does he teach by the human methods. He 
does not speculate about God, as a school professor, draw- 
ing out conclusions by a practice on words, and deeming 
that the way of proof; he does not build up a frame of 
evidence from below, by some constructive process, such 
as the philosophers delight in; but he simply speaks of 
God and spiritual things as one who has come out from 
Him, to tell us what he knows. And his simple telling 
brings us the reality; proves it to us in its own sublime 
self-evidence; awakens even the consciousness of it in our 
own bosom; so that formal arguments or dialectic proofs 
offend us by their coldness, and seem, in fact, to be only 
opaque substances set between us and the light. Indeed, 
he makes even the world luminous by his words—fills it 
with an immediate and new sense of God, which nothing 
has ever been able to expel. The incense of the upper 
world is brought out, in his garments, and flows abroad, 
as a perfume, on the poisoned air. 

At the same time, he never reveals the infirmity so 
_ commonly shown by human teachers, when they veer a 
little from their point, or turn their doctrine off by shades 
uf variation, to catch the assent of multitudes. - He never - 
conforms to an expectation, even of his friends. When 
they look to fird a great prophet in him, he offers nothing 


HIS COMPREHENSIVENESS IS PERFECT. 809 


in the modes of the prophets. When they ask for places 
of distinction in his kingdom, he rebukes their folly, and 
tells them he has nothing to give, but a share in his re- 
proaches and his poverty. When they look to see him 
take the sword as the Great Messiah of their nation, 
caliing the people to his standard, he tells them he is no 
warrior and no king, but only a messenger of love to lost 
men; one that has come to minister and die, but not to 
set up or restore the kingdom. Every expectation that 
rises up to greet him, is repulsed; and yet, so great is the 
power of his manner, that multitudes are held fast, and 
can not yield their confidence. Enveloped as he is in the 
darkest mystery, they trust him still; going after him, 
hanging on his words, as if detained by some charmed 
influence, which they can not shake off or resist. Never 
was there a teacher that so uniformly baffled every ex- 
pectation of his followers, never one that was followed se 
persistently. 

Again, the singular balance of character displayed in 
the teachings of Jesus, indicates an exemption from the 
standing infirmity of human nature. Human opinions 
are formed under a law that seems to be universal. first, 
two opposite extremes are thrown up, in. two opposite 
leaders or parties; then a third party enters, trying to 
find what truth they both are endeavoring to vindicate, 
and settle thus a view of the subject, that includes the 
truth and clears the one-sided extremes, which opposing 
words or figures, not yet measured in their force, had pro 
duced. It results, in this manner, that no man, even the 
broadest in his apprehensions, is ever at the point of equi- 
librium as regards ail subjects. ven the ripest of us are 
continually falling into some extreme, and losing our bal- 


310 | HE IS CLEAR 


ance, afterward to be corrected by some other who dis 
covers our error, or that of our school. 

But Christ was of no school or party, and never went 
to any extreme—words could never turn him to a one 
sided view of any thing. This is the remarkable fact 
that distinguishes him from any cther known teacher of 
the world. Having nothing to work out in a word: 
process, but every thing clear in the simple intuition of 
his superhuman intelligence, he never pushes himself to 
any human eccentricity. It does not even appear that he 
is trying, as we do, to balance opposites and clear extray- 
agances, but he does it, as one who can not imagine a one- 
sided view of any thing. He is never a radical, never a 
conservative. He will not allow his disciples to deny him 
before kings and governors, he will not let them re- 
nounce their allegiance to Cxsar. He exposes the oppres: 
sions of the Pharisees in Moses’ seat, but, encouraging no 
factious resistance, says—‘‘do as they command you.” 
His position as a reformer was universal—according to 
his principles almost nothing, whether in church or state, 
or in social life, was right—and yet he is thrown into no 
antagonism against the world. How a man will do, when 
he engages only in some one reform, acting from his own 
human force; the fuming, storming phrenzy, the holy 
tage and tragic smoke of his violence, how he kindles 
against opposition, grows bitter and restive because of 
delay, and finally comes to maturity in a character thor- 
oughly detestable—all this we know. But Christ, with 
all the world upon his hands, and a reform to be carried 
in almost every thing, is yet as quiet and cordial, and as 
little in the attitude of bitterness or linpatience, as if ali 
hearts were with him, or the work airead y done: so par- 


OF ALL SUPERSTITION, ole 


fect is the balance of his feeling, so intuitively moderated 
is it by a wisdom not human. 

We can not stay to sketch a full outline of this partic. 
ular and sublime excellence, as it was displayed in his 
life. It will be seen as clearly in a single comparison or 
contrast, as Im Maly, or in a more extended inquiry. 
Take, then, for an example, what may be observed in his 
open repugnance to «all superstition, combined with hig 
equal repugnance to what is commonly praised as a mode 
of liberality. He lived in a superstitious age and among 
4 superstitious people. He was a person of low educa- 
tion, and nothing, as we know, clings to the uneducated 
mind with the tenacity of a superstition. Lord Bacon, 
for example, a man certainly of the very highest intellect- 
ual training, was yet infested by superstitions too childish 
to be named with respect, and which clung to him, despite 
of all his philosophy, even to his death. But Christ, with 
no learned culture at all, comes forth out of Galilee, as 
perfectly clean of all the superstitions of his time, as if 
he had been a disciple, from his childhood, of Hume or 
Strauss. “ You children of superstition think,” he says, 
‘that those Galileans, whose blood Pilate mingled with 
their sacrifices, and those eighteen upon whom the tower 
in Siloam fell, must have been monsters, to suffer such 
things. I tell you, nay; but except ye repent, ye shall 
all likewise perish.” To another company he says—‘ You 
imagine, in your Pharisaic and legal morality, that the 
Sabbath of Moses stands in the letter; but I tell you that 
the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sab- 
bath; little honor, therefore, do you pay to God, when 
you teach that it is not lawful to do good on this day. 
Your washings are a great point, you tithe herbs and 


812 HE IS NO LIBERALIST. 


seeds with a sanctimonious fidelity, would it not be as 
well for you teachers of the law, to have some respect ta 
the weightier matters of justice, faith, and benevolence ?” 
Thus, while Socrates, one of the greatest and purest of 
human souls, a man who has attained to many worthy 
conceptions of God, hidden from his idolatrous country- 
men, is constrained to sacrifice a cock to Esculapius, the 
uneducated Jesus lives and dies superior to every super- 
stition of his time; believing nothing because it is be- 
lieved, respecting nothing because it is sanctified by cus- 
tom and by human observance. Even in the closing 
scene of his life, we see his learned and priestly assailants 
refusing to go into the judgment-hall of Caiaphas, lest 
they should be ceremonially defiled and disqualified for 
the feast; though detained by no scruple at all as regards 
the instigation of a murder! While he, on the other hand, 
pitying their delusions, prays for them from his cross— 
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

And yet Christ is no liberal, never takes the ground or 
boasts the distinction of a liberal among his countrymen, 
because it is not a part of his infirmity, in discovering an 
error here, to fly to an excess there. His ground is char- 
ity, not liberality; and the two are as wide apart in their 
practical implications, as adhering to all truth and being 
loose in all. Charity holds fast the minutest atoms of 
truth, as being precious and divine, offended by even su 
much as a thought of laxity. Liberality loosens the terms 
_ of truth; permitting easily and with careless magnanimity 
variations from it; consenting, as it were, in its own sov- 
ereignty, to overlook or allow them; and subsiding thus, ere 
long, into a licentious indifference to all truth, anc.a gen: 
eral defect of responsibility in regard to it. Charity ex- 


H{S SIMPLICITY 1S PERFEC?. 313 


tends allowance to men; liberality, to falsities themselves 
Charity takes the truth to be sacred and immovable; lib: 
erality allows it to be marred and maimed at pleasure. 
How different the manner of Jesus in this respect from 
that unreverent, feeble laxity, that lets the errors be as 
good as the truths, and takes it for a sign of intellectual 
eminence, that one can be floated comfortably in the 
abysses of liberalism. “Judge not,” he says, in holy 
charity, “that ye be not judged;” and again, in holy ex- 
actness, ‘whosoever shall break, or teach to break, one 
of these least commandments, shall be least in the king- 
dom of God;” in the same way, “he that is not with us, 
is against us;” and again, “he that is not against us, is 


” in the same way also, “ye tithe mint, anise, and 


for us; 
cummin ;” and again, “ these things ought ye to have done, 
and not to leave the other undone;” once more, too, in 
the same way, “he that is without sin, let him cast the 


’ and again, “go, and sin no more.” So mag- 


first stone ;’ 
nificent and sublime, so plainly divine, is the balance of 
Jesus. Nothing throws him off the center on which 
truth rests; no prejudice, no opposition, no attempt to 
right a mistake, or rectify a delusion, or réform a practice. 
If this be human, I do not know, for one, what it is to be 
human. 

Again, it is a remarkable and even superhuman dis 
tinction of Jesus, that, while he is advancing doctrines so 
far transcending all deductions of philosophy, and opening 
mysteries that defy all human powers of explication, he 
is yet able to set his teachings in a form of simplicity, 
that accommodates all classes of minds. And this, for the 
reason that he speaks directly to men’s convictions them- 


selves, without and apart from any learned and curious 
27 


Bu oS HE TS INTHELUIGIBCULE 


elaboration, such as the uncultivated can not follow. Ne 
one of the great writers of antiquity had even pro- 
pounded, as yet, a doctrine of virtue which the multitude 
could understand. It was taught as being +o xadov, [the 
tair,] or so xperov, [the becoming,] or something of that 
nature, as distant from all their apprehensions, and as des- 
titute of motive power, as if it were a doctrine of mineral- 
ogy. Considered as a gift to the world at large, it was 
the gift of a stone, not of bread. But Jesus tells them di- 
rectly, in. a manner level to their understanding, what 
they want, what they must do and be, to inherit eternal 
life, and their inmost convictions answer to his words. 
Besides, his doctrine is not so much a doctrine as a biog: 
raphy, a personal power, a truth all motivity, a love walk- 
ing the earth in the proximity of a mortal fellowship. 
He only speaks what goes forth as a feeling and a power 
in his life, breathing into all hearts. To be capable of his 
doctrine, only requires that the hearer be a human creat- 
ure, wanting to know the truth. 

Call him then, who will, a man, a human teacher; 
what human teacher ever came down thus upon the 
soul of the race, as a beam of light from the skies— 
pure light, shining directly into the visual orb of the 
mind, a light for all that live, a full transparent day, in 
which truth bathes the spirit as an element. Others 
talk and speculate about truth, and those who can may 
follow; but Jesus is the truth, and lives it, and, if he 
Is & mere human teacher, he is the first who was ever 
alie to find a form for truth, at all adequate to the 
world’s uses. And yet the truths he teaches out-reach 
all the doctrines of all the philosophers of the world. 
He excels them, a hundred fold more, in the scope and 


TO ALL CLASSES. 815 


grandeur of his doctrine, than he does in his simplicity 
itself. | 

Is this human or is it plainly divine? If you will see 
what is human, or what the wisdom of humanity would 
ordain, it is this—exactly what the subtle and accom- 
plished Celsus, the great adversary of Christianity in ita 
original promulgation, alleges for one of his principal 
arguments against it. “Woolen manufacturers,” he says, 
‘“‘shoemakers, and curriers, the most uneducated and boor- 
ish of men are zealous advocates of this religion; men who 
can not open their mouths before the learned, and who 
only try to gain over the women and children in fam- 
ilies.”* And again, what is only the same objection, un- 
der a different form, assuming that religion, like a philoso- 
phy, must be for the learned, he says, ‘‘He must be void 
of understanding, who can believe that Greeks and barba- 
rians, in Asia, Hurope, and Lybia—all nations to the ends 
of the earth—can unite in one and the same religious doc- 
trine.”t+ So also, Plato says, “it is not easy to find the 
Father and Creator of all existence, and when he is found 
it is impossible to make him known to all.”"{ “But ex- 
actly this, says Justin Martyr, “is what our Christ has ef- 
fected by his power.” And Tertullian also, glorying in 
the simplicity of the gospel, as already proved to be a 
truly divine excellence, says, ‘Every christian artisan 
has found God, and points him out to thee, and, in fact, 
shows thee every thing which is sought for in God, al- 
though Plato maintains that the creator of the world is not 
easily found, and that, when he is found, he can not 
be made known to all.”§ Here then, we have Christ 


—S — he ee 


* Neander’s Memorials uf Christian Life, p. 19. + lb, Dg, 
¢ Timzeus. § Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, p. 19 


§16 HIS MORALITY 


against Oelsus, and Christ against Plato. These agree in 
assuming that we have a God, whom only the great can 
mount high enough in argument. to know. Christ reveals 
# God whom the humblest artisan can teach, and all 
mankind embrace, with a faith that unifies them all. 

Again, the morality of Jesus has a practical superiority 
to that of all human-teachers, in the fact that it is not an 
artistic, or theoretically elaborated scheme, but one that is 
propounded in precepts that carry their own evidence, and 
are, in fact, great spiritual laws ordained by God, in the 
throne of religion. He did not draw long arguments to 
settle what the summum bonum is, and then produce a 
scheme of ethics to correspond. He did not go into the 
vexed question, what is the foundation of virtue? and 
hang a system upon his answer. Nothing falls into an ar- 
tistic shape, as when Plato or Socrates asks what kind of 
action is beautiful action? reducing the principles of 
morality to a form as difficult for the uncultivated, as the 
art of sculpture itself{ Yet, Christ excels them all in the 
beauty of his precepts, without once appearing to consider 
their beauty. He simply comes forth telling us, from God, 
what to do, without deducing any thing in a critical way; 
and yet, while nothing has ever yet been settled by the 
eritics and theorizing philosophers, that could stand fast 
and compel the assent of the race, even for a year, the 
morality of Christ is about as firmly seated in the convie- 
tions of men, as the law of gravity in their bodies. 

Ife comes into the world full of all moral beauty, as 
God of physical; and as God was not obliged to sect him- 
self to a course of esthetic study, when he created the 
forms and landscapes of the world, so Christ comes to 
his rules, by no critical practice in words. He opens his 


+> 


IS NOTr ARTISTIC. Siy 


lips, and the creative glory of his mind pours itself forth 
in ving precepts—Do to others as ye would that others 
should do to you—Blessed are the peacemakers—Smitten 
upon one cheek, turn the other—Resist not evil—For- 
give your enemies—Do good to them that hate you—Lend 
not, hoping to receive—Receive the truth as little children. 
Omitting all the deep spiritual doctrines he taught, and 
taking all the human teachers on their own ground, the 
ground of preceptive morality, they are seen at once, to 
be meager and cold; little artistic inventions, gleams of 
high conceptions caught by study, having about the same 
relation to the christian morality, that a statue has to the 
flexibility, the self-active force, and flushing warmth of 
man, as he goes forth in the image of his Creator, to be 
the reflection of His beauty and the living instrument of 
his will. Indeed, it is the very distinction of Jesus that 
he teaches, not a verbal, but an original, vital, and divine 
morality. He does not dress up a moral picture and ask 
you to observe its beauty, he only tells you how to live; 
and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, 
have been those who received and lived his precepts with- 
out once conceiving their beauty. 

Once more it is a high distinction of Christ’s character, 
as seen in his teachings, that he is never anxious for the 
success of his doctrine. Fully conscious of the fact that 
the world is against him, scoffed at, despised, hated, alone 
too in his cause, and without partisans that have any pub- 
lic influence, no man has ever been able to detect in him the 
least anxiety for the final success of his doctrine. He is 
never jealous of contradiction. When his friends display 
their dullness and incapacity, or even when they forsake 


him, he is never ruffled or disturbed. He rests on his 
aANK 


318 NEVER ANXIOUS FOR SUCCESS. 


words, with a composure as majestic as if he were sitting 
ou the circle of the heavens. Now the consciousness of 
truth, we are not about to deny, has an effect of this na- 
ture in every truly great mind. But when has it had an 
effect so complete? What human teacher, what great phi- 
losopher has not shown some traces of anxiety for his 
school, that indicated his weakness; some pride in his 
friends, some dislike of his enemies, some traces of wound- 
ed ambition, when disputed or denied? But here is a lone 
-man, a humble, uneducated man, never schooled into the 
elegant fiction of an assumed composure, or practiced in 
the conventional dignities of manners, and yet, finding all 
the world against him, the earth does not rest on its axle 
more firmly than he upon his doctrine. Questioned by 
Pilate what he means by truth, it is enough to answer— 
‘Te that is of the truth heareth my voice.” If this be 
human, no other man of the race, we are sure, has ever 
dignified humanity by a like example. 

Such is Christ asa teacher. When has the world seen a 
phenomenon like this; a lonely uninstructed youth, coming 
forth amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more dis- 
‘tinct from his age, and from every thing around him, than 
a Plato would be rising up alone in some wild tribe in 
Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world, 
and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self: 
evidence of his life and doctrine! Does he this by the force 
of mere human talent or genius? If so, it is time that 
we begin to look to genius for miracles; for there is really 
no greater miracle. 


There is yet one other and more inclusive distinction of 
the character of Jesus, which must not be omitted, and 


"tHE MORE FAMILIARLY KNOWN, 319 


which sets him off more widely from all the mere men of 
the race, just because it raises a contrast which is, at once, 
total and experimental. Human characters are alwava 
reduced in their eminence, and the impressions of awe 
they have raised, by a closer and more complete acquaint: 
ance. Weakness and blemish are discovered by familiar- 
ity; admiration lets in qualifiers; on approach, the halo 
dims a little. But it was not so with Christ. With his 
disciples, in closest terms of intercourse, for three whole 
years; their brother, friend, teacher, monitor, guest, fellow- 
traveler; seen by them under all the conditions of public 
ministry, and private society, where the ambition of show, 
or the pride of power, or the ill-nature provoked by an- 
noyance, or the vanity drawn out by confidence, would 
most certainly be reducing him to the criticism even of 
persons most unsophisticated, he is yet visibly raising their 
sense of his degree and quality; becoming a greater won- 
der, and holier mystery, and gathering to his person feel- 
ings of reverence and awe, at once more general and more 
sacred. Jamiliarity operates a kind of apotheosis, and the 
man becomes divinity, in simply being known. At first, 
he is the Son of Mary and the Nazarene carpenter. Next, 
he is heard speaking with authority, as contrasted even 
with the Scribes. Next, he is conceived by some to be 
certainly Elias, or some one of the prophets, returned in 
power to the world. Peter takes him up, at that point, as 
being certainly the Christ, the great, mysterious Messiah ; 
cnly not so great that he is not able to reprove him, when 
lie begins to talk of being killed by his enemies; protest- 
ing—**>de it far from thee Lord.” But the next we see of 
the once bold apostle, he is beckoning to another, at the 
table, to whisper the Lord and ask who it is that is going 


320 THE DEEPER THE REVERENCE 


to betray him; unable himself to so much as invade tke 
sacred ear of his Master with the audible and open ques: 
tion. ‘Then, shortly after, when he comes out of the hall 
of Caiaphas, flushed and flurried with his threefold lie, and 
his base hypocrisy of cursing, what do we see but that, 
simply catching the great master’s eye, his heart breaks 
down, riven with insupportable anguish, and is utterly dis- 
solved in childish tears. And so it will be discovered in all 
the disciples, that Christ is more separated from them, and 
holds them in deeper awe, the closer he comes to them and 
the more perfectly they know him. The same too is true 
of his enemies. At first, they look on him only as some 
new fanatic, that has come to turn the heads of the peo- 
ple. Next, they want to know whence he drew his opin- 
ions, and his singular accomplishments in the matter of 
public address; not being, as all that knew him testify, an 
educated man, Next, they send out a company to arrest 
him, and, when they hear him speak, they are so deeply 
impressed that they dare not do it, but go back, under a 
kind of invincible awe, testifying—' never man spake like 
this man.” Afterward, to break some fancied spell there 
may be in him, they hire one of his own friends to betray 
him; and even then, when. they are come directly before 
him and hear him speak, they are in such tremor of appre- 
hension, lest he should suddenly annihilate them, that they 
reel incontinently backward and are pitched on the ground. 
Pilate trembles visibly before him, and the more because of 
his silence and his wonderful submission. And then, when 
the fatal deed is done, what do we see but that the multi- 
tude, awed by some dread mystery in the person of the crn: 
tified, return home smiting on their breasts for anguish, in 
the sense of what their infatuated and guilty rage has done. 


IN WHICH HE IS HELD. 82] 


The most conspicuous matter therefore, in the history 
of Jesus, is, that what holds true, in all our experience 
of men, is inverted in him. He grows sacred, peculiar. 
wonderful, divine, as acquaintance reveals him. At first 
he is only a man, as the senses report him to be; knowl- 
edge, observation, familiarity, raise him into the God- 
man, He grows pure and perfect, more than mortal in 
wisdom, a being enveloped in sacred mystery, a friend to 
be loved in awe—dies into awe, and a sorrow that con- 
tains the element of worship! And exactly this appears 
in the history, without any token of art, or even apparent 
consciousness that it does appear—appears because it is 
true. Probably no one of the evangelists, ever so much 
as noticed this remarkable inversion of what holds good 
respecting men, in the life and character of Jesus. Is this 
character human, or is it plainly divine? 


We have now sketched some of the principal distine- 
tions of the superhuman character of Jesus. We have 
seen him unfolding as a flower, from the germ of a perfect 
youth; growing up to enter into great scenes and have his 
part in great trials; harmonious in all with himself and 
truth, a miracle of celestial beauty. He is a Lamb in in- 
nocence, a God in dignity; revealing an impenitent but 
faultless piety, such as no mortal ever attempted, such as 
to the highest of mortals, is inherently impossible. He 
advances the most extravagant pretensions, without any 
show of conceit, or even seeming fault of modesty. He 
suffers without affectation of composure and without re- 
straint of pride, suffers as no mortal sensibility can, and 
where, to mortal view, there was no reason for pain at all; 
giving us not only an example of gentleness and patience 


rs 


822, “SUCH A CHARACTER 


in all the small trials of’ life, but revealing the depths even 
of the passive virtues of God, in his agony and the 
patience of his suffering love. He undertakes also a plan, 
universal in extent, perpetual in time; viz., to unite all 
nations in a kingdom of righteousness under God; laying 
his foundations in the hearts of the poor, as no great teach- 
er had ever done before, and yet without creating ever a 
faction, or stirring one partisan feeling in his followers. 
In his teachings he is perfectly original, distinct from his 
age and from al] ages; never warped by the expectation 
of his friends; always in a balance of truth, swayed by no 
excesses, running to no oppositions or extremes; clear of 
all superstition, and equally clear of all liberalism; pre- 
senting the highest doctrines in the lowest and simplest 
forms; establishing a pure, universal morality, never be- 
fore established; and, with all his intense devotion to the 
truth, never anxious, perceptibly, for the success of his 
doctrine. Finally, to sum up all in one, he grows more 
great, and wise, and sacred, the more he is known—needs, 
in fact, to be known, to have his perfection seen. And 
this, we say, is Jesus, the Christ; manifestly not human, 
not of our world—some being who has burst into it, 
and is not of it. Call him for the present, that “holy 
thing” and say, ‘by this we believe that thou camest from 
rod.” 

Not to say that we are dissatisfied with this sketch, 
would be almost an irreverence of itself, to the subject of 
it. Who can satisfy himself with any thing that he can say 
of Jesus Christ? We have seen, how many pictures ot 
the sucred person of Jesus, by the first masters; but not 
one, among them all, that did not rebuke the weakness 
which could dare attempt an impossible subject. So of 


DIP ACTUALLY EXIST. 38238 


the character of Jesus. It is necessary, for the holy inter- 
est of truth, that we should explore it, as we are bes 
able; but what are human thoughts and human concep: 
tions, on a subject that dwarfs all thought and immediately 
outgrows whatever is conceived. And yet, for the rea- 
son that we have failed, we seem also to have succeeded, 
For the more impossible it is found to be, to grasp the 
character and set it forth, the more clearly is it seen to be 
above our range—a miracle and a mystery. , 


Two questions now remain which our argument requires 
to be answered. And the first is this—did any such char- 
acter, as this we have been tracing, actually exist? Ad- 
initting that the character, whether it be fact or fiction, is 
puch as Wwe have seen it to be, it must inevitably follow, 
either that such a character actually lived, and was possi- 
ble to be described, because it furnished the matter of the 
picture, itself; or else, that Jesus, being a merely human 
character as he lived, was adorned or set off in this man- 
ner, by the exaggerations of fancy, and fable, and wild tra- 
dition afterward. In the former alternative, we have the 
insuperable difficulty of believing, that any so perfect and 
glorious character was ever attained to by a mortal. If 
Christ was a merely natural man, then was he under all 
the conditions privative, as regards the security of his vir- 
tue, that we have discovered in man. He was a new-cre- 
ated being, as such to be perfected in a character of stead- 
fast holiness, only by the experiment of evil and redemp- 
tion from it. We can believe any miracle, therefore, more 
easily than that Christ was a man, and yet a perfect char- 
acter, such as here is given. In the latter alternative, we 
have four different writers, widely distinguished in their 


824 HE WAS AN ACTUALLY 


style and mental habit—inferior persons, all, as regar.ls 
their accomplishments, and none of them remarkable fot 
gifts of genius—contributing their parts, and coalescing thus 
in the representation of a character perfectly harmonious 
with itself and, withal, a character whose ideal no poet 
had been able to create, no philosopher, by the profound- 
est effort of thought, to conceive and set forth to the 
world. What is more, these four writers are, by the sup: 
position, children all of credulity, retailing the absurd gos- 
sip and the fabulous stories of an age of marvels, and yet, 
by some accident, they are found to have conceived and 
sketched the only perfect character known to mankind. 
To believe this, requires a more credulous age than these 
writers ever saw. We fall back then upon our conclu- 
sion, and there we rest. Such was the real historic char- 
acter of Jesus. Thus he lived, and the character 1s possi- 
ble to be conceived, because it was actualized in a living 
example. The only solution is that which is given by 
Jesus himself, when he says—‘“I came forth from the Fa- 
ther, and am come into the world.” 

The second question is this; whether this character is 
to be conceived as an actually existing, sinless character in 
the world? That it is I maintain, because the character 
can no otherwise be accounted for in its known excellences. 
How was it that a simple-minded peasant of Galilee, was 
able to put himself in advance, in this manner, of all hu- 
man teaching and excellence; unfolding a character so pe- 
cular in its combinations, and so plainly impossible to any 
mere man of the race? Because his soul was filled with 
internal beauty and purity, having no spot, or stain, dis- 
torted by no obliquity of view or feeling, lapsing there- 
fore into no eccentricity or deformity. We can make cut 


SINLESS CHARACTER. «395 


no account of him sc easy to believe, as that he was sin- 
less; indeed, we can make no other account of him at 
all. He realized what are, humanly speaking, impossibil- 
ities; for his soul was warped and weakened by no hu- 
man infirmities, doing all in a way of ease and natural: 
ness, just because it is easy for clear waters to flow from a 
pure spring. ‘'T’o believe that Jesus got up these high con- 
ceptions artistically, and then acted them, in spite of the 
conscious disturbance of his internal harmony, and the 
conscious clouding of his internal purity by sin, would in- 
volve a degree of credulity and a want of perception, as re- 
gards the laws of the soul and their necessary action un- 
der sin, so lamentable as to be a proper subject of pity. 
We could sooner believe all the fables of the Talmud. 
Besides, if Jesus was a sinner, he was conscious of sin 
as all sinners are, and therefore was a hypocrite in the 
whole fabric of his character; realizing so much of divine 
beauty in it, maintaining the show of such unfaltering har- 
mony and celestial grace, and doing all this with a mind 
confused and fouled by the affectations acted for true vir- 
tues! Such an example of successful hypocrisy would be 
itself the greatest miracle ever heard of in the world. 
Furthermore, if Jesus was a sinner, then he was, ol 
eourse, a fallen being; down under the bondage, distorted 
by the perversity of sin and its desolating effects, as men 
are. ‘The root therefore of all his beauty is guilt. Evil 
has broken loose in him, he is held fast under evil. Bad 
thoughts are streaming through his soul in bad succes- 
sions; his tempers have lost their tune; his affections 
have been touched by leprosy; remorse scowls upon his 
heart; his views have lost their balance and contracted ob- 


liquity; ina word, heis fallen. Isit then such a being, one 
28 


326 SPECIFICATIONS AGAINST IT 


who has been touched, in this manner, by the demonic 
spell of evil—is it he that 1s unfolding such a character? 

What then do our critics in the school of naturalism 
pay of this character of Christ? Of course they are 
obliged to say many handsome and almost saintly things 
of it. Mr. Parker says of him, that— He unites in him- 
self the sublimest precepts and divinest practices, thus 
more than realizing the dream of prophets and. sages; 
rises free from all prejudice of his age, nation, or sect; 
gives free range to the spirit of God, in his breast; sets 
aside the law, sacred and true—honored as it was, its 
forms, its sacrifice, its temple, its priests; puts away the 
doctors of the law, subtle, irrefragable, and pours out a 
doctrine beautiful as the light, sublime as Heaven, and 
srue as God.’* Again—as if to challenge for his doc- 
trine, the distinction of a really superhuman excellence— 
“Try him as we try other teachers. They deliver their 
word, find a few waiting for the consolation who accept 
the new tidings, follow the new method, and soon go be- 
yond their teacher, though less mighty minds than he. 
Though humble men, we see what Socrates and Luther 
never saw. But eighteen centuries have past, since the 
Sun of humanity rose so high in Jesus; what man, what 
sect has mastered his thought, comprehended his method, 
and so fully applied it to lifel”t 

Mr. Hennel, who writes in a colder mood, bat has, on 
the whole, produced the ablest of all the arguments yet of: 
fered on this side, speaks more cautiously. He says— 
“Whilst no human character, in the history of the world, 
can be brought to mind, which, in proportion as it could 
be closely examined, did not present some defects, dis- 


—_— 


* Discaurses of Religion, p. 294. + Ib., p. 303. 


BY PARKER AND HENNEL. 827 


qualifying it for being the emblem of moral perfection, we 
can rest, with least check or sense of incongruity, on the 
imperfectly known character of Jesus of Nazareth.”* 

- But the intimation here is that the character 1s not per 
fect; it is only one in which the sense of perfection suffers 
“least check.” And where is the fault charged? Why, 
it is discovered that Jesus cursed a fig-tree, in which he is 
seen to be both angry and unreasonable. He denounced 
the Pharisees in terms of bitter animosity. He also drove 
the money-changers out of the temple with a scourge of 
rods, in which he is even betrayed into an act of physical 
violence. These and such like specks of fault are discov- 
ere, as they think, in the life of Jesus. So graceless in 
our conceit, have we of this age grown, that we can think 
it a point of scholarly dignity and reason to spot the only 
perfect beauty that has ever graced our world, with such 
discovered blemishes as these! As if sin could ever need 
to be made out against a real sinner, in this small way 
of special pleading; or as if it were ever the way of sin 
to err in single particles or homeopathic quantities 
of wrong! A more just sensibility would denounce this 
malignant style of criticism, as a heartless and really low- 
minded pleasure in letting down the honors of goodness. 

In justice to Mr. Parker, it must be admitted that he 
does not actually charge these points of history as faults, 
or blemishes in the character of Jesus. And yet, in 
jastice also, it must be added that he does compose 
a section under the heading—‘ The Negative Side, or the 
Limitations of Jesus,”—where these, with other like mat- 
ters, are thrown in by insinuation, as possible charges 
sometimes advanced by others. For himself, he alleges 


* Inquiry, p. 451. 


Suan THE MANLIER OPINION 


nothing positive, but that Jesus was under the popular 
delusion of his time, in respect to devils or demoniacal 
possessions, and that he was mistaken in some of his ref: 
erences to the Old Testament. What now is to be 
thought of euch material, brought forward under such a 
heading, to flaw such a character! Is it sure that Christ 
was mistaken in his belief of the foul spirits? Is it cer: 
tain that a sufficient mode of interpretation will not clear 
his references of mistake? And so, when it is suggested, 
at second hand, that his invective is too fierce against the 
Pharisees, is there no escape, but to acknowledge that, 
‘considering his youth, it was a venial error?” Or, if 
there be no charge but this, ‘‘at all affecting the moral 
and religious character of Jesus,” should not a just rever- 
ence to one whose life is so nearly faultless, constrain us 
to look for some more favorable construction, that takes 
the solitary blemish away? Is it true that invective is a 
uecessary token of ill-nature? Are there no occasions 
where even holiness will be most forward in it? And 
when a single man stands out alone, facing a whole living 
order and caste, that rule the time—oppressors of the 
poor, hypocrites and pretenders in religion, corrupters of 
all truth and faith, under the names of learning and relig- 
1on—is the malediction, the woe, that he hurls against 
them, to be taken as a fault of violence and unregulated 
passion ; or, considering what amount of force and public 
influence he dares to confront and set in deadly enmity 
against his person, is he rather to be accepted as God’s 
champion, in the honors of a great and genuinely heroie 
spirit ? 

Considering how fond the world is of invective, how 
teady to admire the rhetone of sharp words, how many 


OF MILTON. 329 


speakers study to excel in the fine art of excoriation, how 
many reformers are applauded in vehement attacks on 
character, and win a great repute of fearlessness, just be- 
cause of their severity, when, in fact, there is nothing te 
fear-——when possibly the subject is a dead man, not yet 
buried—it is really a most striking tribute to the more 
than human character of Jesus, that we are found 
to be so apprehensive respecting him in_ particular, 
lest his plain, unstudied, unrhetorical severities on this or 
that occasion, may imply some possible defect, or “ venial 
error,” in him. Why this special sensibility to fault in 
him? save that, by his beautiful and perfect life, he has 
raised our conceptions so high as to make, what we might 
applaud in a man, a possible blemish in his divine ex- 
cellence ? 

‘The glorious old reformer and blind poet of Puritan- 
ism—vindicator of a free commonwealth and a free, un- 
prelatical religion—holds, in our view, a far worthier and 
manlier conception of what Christ does, in this example, 
and of what is due to all the usurpations of titled conceit 
and oppression in the world. With truly refreshing ve- 

emence, he writes—‘‘For in times of opposition, when 
against new heresies arising, or old corruptions to be re- 
formed, this cool, impassionate mildness of positive wis- 
dom is not enough to damp and astonish the proud resist- 
ance of carnal and false doctors, then (that I may have 
leave to soar awhile, as the poets use,) Zeal, whose sub- 
stance 1s ethereal, arming in complete diamond, ascends 
his fiery chariot, drawn by two blazing meteors figured 
like beasts, but of a higher breed than any the zodiac 
yields, resembling those four which Ezekiel and St. John 


saw, the one visaged like a lion, to express power, high 
28* 


880 THE CHANGE, SUCH A CHARACTER 


authority, and indignation, the other ot man, to cast de 
rision and scorn upon perverse and fraudulent seducers— 
with them the invincible warrior, Zeal, shaking loosely 
the slack reins, drives over the heads of scarlet prelates 
and such as are insolent to maintain traditions, bruising 
their stiff necks under his flaming wheels. Thus did the 
true prophets of old combat with the false; thus Christ, 
liimself the fountain of meekness, found acrimony enough 
tu be still galling and vexing the prelatical Pharisees. 
But ye will say, these had immediate warrant from God 
to be thus bitter; and I say, so much the plainer is it 
found that there may be a sanctified bitterness against the 
enemies of the truth.” * 

And what other conception had Christ himself of the 
meaning and import of his conduct in the matter in ques- 
tion? He felt a zeal within him, answering to Milton’s 
picture, which could not, must not, be repressed. He 
knew it would be blamed, or set in charge against him, 
by false critics and uncharitable doubters—and he said, 
“The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up.” And still it 
was, when rightly viewed, only a necessary outburst of 
that indignant fire, which is kindled in the sweet bosom 
of innocence, by the insolence of hypocrisy and oppres- 
sion. : 

T conclude, then, (1.) that Christ actually lived and bore 
the real character ascribed to him in the history.. And 
(2.) that he was a sinless character. How far off is he 
~ now from any possible classification in the genus human 
ity! Having reached this point, we are ready to pass, m 
the next chapter, to the christian miracles, and show that 
Christ, being himself the greatest of all miracles, in his 


ont 


* Apology for Smectymnus, Sect. I. 


HAS MADE IN OUR WORLD, 33] 


own person, did, in perfect consistency, and without creat 
ing any greater difficulty, work miracles. 


But before we drop a theme like this, let us note more 
distinctly the significance of this glorious advent, and 
have our congratulations in it. This one perfect charae- 
ter has come into our world, and lived in it; filling all 
the molds of action, all the terms of duty and love, with 
his own divine manners, works, and charities. All the 
conditions of our life are raised thus, by the meaning he 
has shown to be in them, and the grace he has put upon 
them. The world itself is changed, and is no more the 
same that it was; it has never been the same, since Jesus 
left it. The air is charged with heavenly odors, and a 
kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, is 
wafted on us in its breath. Let the dark ages come, let 
society roll backward and churches perish in whole re- 
gions of the earth, let infidelity deny, and, what is worse, 
let spurious piety dishonor the truth; still there is ‘a some- 
thing here that was not, and a something that has immor- 
tality init. Still our confidence remains unshaken, that 
Christ and his all-quickening life are in the world, as fixed 
elements, and will be to the end of time; for Christianity 
is not so much the advent of a better doctrine, as of a per- 
fect character; and how can a perfect character, once en- 
tered into lifeand history, be separated and finally expelled? 
It were easier to untwist all the beams of light in the sky, 
separating and expunging one of the colors, than to get the 
character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of the 
world. Look ye hither, meantime, all ye blinded and 
fallen of mankind, a better nature 1s among you, a pure 
heart, out of some pure world, is come into your prison, 


8389 IS RADICAL AND FINAL. 


and walks it with you. Do you require of us to show who | 
he is, and definitely to expound his person? We may 
not be able. Knough to know that he is not of us—some 
strange being out of nature and above it, whose name is 
Wonderful. Enough that sin has never touched his hal- 
lowed nature, and that he is a friend. In him dawns a 
hope—purity has not come into our world, except to pu- 
rify. Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins 
of the world! Light breaks in, peace settles on the air, 
lo! the prison walls are giving way —rise, let us go. 


CHAPTER XI. 


CHRIST PERFORMED MIRACLES. 


Ir used to be the practice of theologians, to cite the 
miracles of Christ as proofs of his doctrine, and even of 
the gospel history ; not observing that the conditions of 
the question are entirely changed since the days of the 
first witnesses. To the cotemporaries and attendants on- 
the ministry of Jesus, he might well enough be approved 
of God, by miracles and signs; for, being themselves 
eye-witnesses, they could easily be sure of the facts. But 
to those who saw them not, to us who have heard of them 
only by the report of history, they can never be cited as 
proofs, because the main thing to be settled, with us, 1s 
the verity of the facts themselves. The gospel history, 
instead of being attested to us by the miracles, has them 
rather as a heavy burden resting on its own credibility. 
Doubtless it is true that, if such a being as Christ were to 
come into the world, on such an errand as the gospel re- 
ports, we should look to see him verify his mission by 
miracles, and without the miracles we’ should suspect the 
authenticity of his pretensions. As far, therefore, as the 
miracles sort with the person of Christ and his mission, as 
set forth in his gospels, there is a harmony of parts in the 
history, that is one of the evidences of its truth. It is 
even a necessary evidence, yet scarcely a sufficient evi- 
dence by itself. We still require to be certified that the 
miracles reported are facts. ‘This done, Christianity, as a 
supernatural revelation of God, is established. Until 
then, the miracles are,.it must be admitted, a subtraction 


304 MODES OF DOUBT, OR DENIAL 


from its rational evidence; even though the subject mat: 
ter of the history be incomplete, and so far wanting in 
rational evidence, without them. 

The ground taken against the Christian miracles, by 
Spinoza, in which he is followed by Mr. Parker, is this: 
that they dishonor God, as involving the opinion that his 
great revelation in nature is insufficient, and needs after- 
ward to be amended, and that, in doing it by miracles, he 
is conceived to overturn his own laws, and break up the 
order of his work. | 

Hume was an atheist, and, of course, had nothing to 


say of God, or the confusion of his plan. Assuming that. 


we know nothing save by experience, he argued that we 
know by experience the fallibility of all testimony, and 
the uniformity of the laws of nature. Hence that no 
amount of testimony can justify our belief in a miracle; 
for we have, and must have, a stronger faith in the uni- 
formity of the laws of nature, than we can have im any 
testimony. 

_ Assisted in this skeptical tendency by modern scieuce, 
which has set the laws of nature, for the time, in such 
prominence, as to operate a real suppression of thought 


in the spiritual direction, Dr. Strauss assumes the incredi-- 


bility of miracles, without much care for the argument, 
and bases on that assumption his deliberate and powerful 
assault upon the gospel history. | 

Against these and similar modes of denial, which dis- 
tinguish the naturalistic tendencies of our time, we now 
undertake, assisted by the material already prepared, in 
the preceding chapters, to establish the fact of the Chris- 
tian miracles. Our argument will not prove every one 
of them, or, in fact, any particular one; for the question 


—— a Pie 


MIRACLES DEFINED. ood 


will still be open, for such as choose to engage in it, 
whether this, or that, or some of them, are not to be dis: 
credited for particular reasons, which display the mistake 
or credulity of the narrators. We shall only show that 
Christ wrought miracles, which is the great: point in issue, 


Net us endeavor, then, first of all, as a matter on which 
every thing depends, to settle what is to be understood by 
a iniracle, or what a miracle is. 

We have raised a clear distinction already between na- 
ture and the supernatural; viz., that nature is the chain 
of cause and effect—that coming to pass which is deter- 
mined by the laws of cause and effect in things. The 
supernatural is that which acts on the chain of cause and 
effect, from without the chain; not being caused in its 
action, but acting from itself, under no conditions of pre- 
vious causality. The distinction of nature and the super- 
natural is the distinction, in fact, between propagations of 
causality and original causality, between things and powers. 
In this view, man, as a power, together with all created 
spirits, good and bad, is a supernatural being co-ordinate 
with God, in so far as he acts freely and morally. If he 
moves but a limb in his freedom, he acts on the lines of 
cause and effect in nature; and if, in moving that limb 
he has committed a murder, we blame him for it, and 
bring him to a felon’s punishment; simply because he 
was not caused to do the deed, by any efficient cause back 
of him, but did it of himself; or, as the common law has 
it, “by malice aforethought.” 

But we do not call these free moral actions of man, 
miracles, because they are common, and because there is 
no attribute of wonder connected with them. What then 


336 THREE ELEMENTS INCLUDED 


is a miracle? It is a supernatural act, an act, that 1s, 


which operates on the chain of cause and effect in nature 
from without the chain, producing, in the sphere of the 
genses, some event that moves our wonder, and evinces 
the presence of a more than human power. Observe 
three points. (1.) It is by some action upon, not i, the 
line of cause and effect; (2.) it.is in the sphere of the 
senses, for, though the regeneration of a soul may require 
as great power as the raising of Lazarus, it is yet no 
proper miracle, because it is no sign to the senses; (3.) it 
must be understood to evince a superhuman power, other- 
wise feats of jugglery and magic would be miracles. We 
commonly suppose, in miracles, a deific power, though 
sometimes we refer them to a subordinate, angelic, or de- 


moniacal power; as when we speak of signs and lying 


wonders, that are wrought by no divine agency. The 
word miracle, which is a Latin diminutive, properiy de- 
notes some limited or isolated fict, that we wonder at. It 
takes the diminutive form probably because it relates to 
something parceled off from the whole of nature, which, 
in that view, is small, or partial. The scripture uses sev- 
eral terms or names to denote such events, calling them 
“sions,” ‘ wonders,” ‘ powers:” and once, rapadeSa, trans 
lated ‘strange things.” 

To make our definition yet more exact, or to clear 11 
yet farther of ambiguity, let us add the following nega- 
tives. 

1. A miracle is not, as our definition itself implies, any 
wonderful event developed under the laws of nature, or 
of natural causation. Some religious teachers have takcn 
this ground, suggesting that nature was originally planned, 
or preformed, so as to bring out these particular surprises, 


P 


FOUR MISCONCEPTIONS CORRECTED. 333 


at the points where they occur. Doubtless God’s original 
scheme, taken as a whole, was so planned, or preformed; 
but that scheme included more than mere nature, viz., all 
supernatural agencies and events, and even his own 
works, or actions, in the higher, vaster field of the super- 
natural, But it is a very different thing to imagine that 
nature is every thing, and that the surprises are all devel- 
opments of nature. 

2. A miracle is no event that transpires singly, or apart 
from system; for the real system of God is not nature, as 
we have seen, but that vaster whole of government and 
order, including spirits, of which nature is only a very 
subordinate and coraparatively insignificant member. In 
this higher view, a miracle is in’such a sense part of the 
integral system of God, that it would be no perfect system 
without the miracle. Hence all that is said against mira- 
cles, as a disruption of order in God’s kingdom—there 
fore incredible and dishonorable to God—is without 
foundation. 

3. A miracle is no contradiction of our experience. It 
is only an event that exceeds the reach of our experience. 
We have a certain experience of what is called nature and 
the order of nature. But what will be the effect, in the 
field of nature, when the supernatural order mects it, or 
streams into it, we can not tell; our experience here ig 
Jimited to the results or effects that may be wrought, by 
our own supernatural agency. What the supernatural di 
vine, or angelic, or demonic agency may be able to do in 
it, we know not. Therefore, all that is alleged by Mr. 
Hume falls to the ground. It may be more difficult to 
believe, or more difficult to prove such facts, wrought by 


such agencies: but not because they are contrary, in aay 
29 ; 


338 ADMISSIONS MADE 


proper sense, t our experience. They are only inore 
strange to our experience. 

4, A miracle is no suspension, or violation, of the laws 
of nature. Here is the point where the advocates of 
miracles have so fatally weakened their cause by too large 
astatement. ‘The laws of nature are subordinated to mir- 
acles, but they are not suspended, or discontinued by them. 
If I raise my arm, I subordinate the law of gravity and pro- 
duce a result against the force of gravity, but the law, or 
the force, is not discontinued. On the contrary it is act- 
ing still, at every moment, as uniformly as if it held the 
arm to its place. All the vital agencies maintain a chem: 
istry of their own, that subordinates the laws of inorganie 
chemistry. Nothing is more familiar to us, than the fact 
of a subordination of natural laws. It is the great game 
of life, also, to conquer nature and make it what, of it- 
self, by its own laws of cause and effect, it is not. We 
raised the supposition, on a former occasion, of another 
physical universe, separated from the existing universe, 
and placed beyond a gulf, across which no one effect 


ever travels. If now that other universe were swung up ~ 


side by side with this, it would instantly change all the 
action of this—not by suspending its laws, but by an ac- 
tion that subordinates and varies its action. So the realm 
of spirits is a realm that is permitted, or empowered to 
come down upon this other, which is called nature, and 
play its activity upon it, according to the plan God has 
before adjusted; but this activity suspends no law, breaxs 
no bond of system. Nature stands fast, with all her terms 
of cause and effect, as before, a constant quantity, inter- 
pose by God to be a medium between supernatural 
beings, in their relative actions. They are to have their 


7 
y 
4 
c 


BY OPPOSERS OF MIRACLES. 339 


exercise in it, and upon it, and so, by their activity, they 
are to make a moral acquaintance with each other; men with 
men, all created spirits with all, God with creatures, creat- 
‘ures with God; acquaintance also with the uses of laws 
by the wrongs they suffer, and with their own bad mind 
by seeing what wrongs they do—so by their whole ex- 
perience to be trained, corrected, assimilated in love, and 
finished in holy virtue. There is no more a suspen 
sion of the laws of nature, when God acts, than when we 
do; for nature is, by her very laws, subjected to his and 
our uses, to be swayed, and modified, and made a sign-lan- 
guage, so to speak, of mutual acquaintance between us. 


By these four negatives, distinctly premised, we seern 
to have cleared the faith of miracles of all needless incum- 
brances, and, in that way, to have cut off the principal ob- 
jections urged against their credibility. Before proceed: 
ing, however, to inquire after the more positive proofs of 
the christian miracles, it may be well to glance at the po- 
sitions taken, by some of the principal advocates of natu- 
ralism, and especially to the admissions they are sometimes 
constrained to make. 

Thus it is conceded by Mr. Hennel that—‘‘It seems be- 
yond the power of intellect to decide a@ priori, whether 
a miraculous revelation, or instruction through nature 
alone, be more suitable to the character of God.”* There 
is then no inherent absurdity in the supposition, that God, 
as the spring of scientific unity and order in his works, 
should yet perform miracles. Whatever doubts we sutfer 
of their reality must be grounded in defects of historic 
evidence, This is a large concession. 


* Inquiry, p. 96. 


840 ADMISSIONS MADE 


Coincidently with this, Mr. Pavker admits, that ‘there 
is no antecedent objection” to miracles, if only they are 
wrought “in conformity with some law out of our reach.” 
And exactly this is true of all supernatural divine agency; 
as we have abundantly shown—only the laws of God’s su- 
pernatural agency are laws of reason, or such as respect 
his last end, and the best way of compassing that end; 
which laws are yet so stable and so exactly universal, that 
he will always do exactly the same things, in exactly the 
same circumstances or conditions. 

The admissions of Dr. Strauss are even more remark- 
able. We have already referred to his admission that one 
“kingdom in nature may. intrench on another,” and that 
“human freedom” may, in this way, modify ‘natural devel- 
opment.”+ Ask the question accordingly, wherein is it 
less credible that the freedom of God may do as much? 
and we have, as the necessary answer, what contains the 
whole doctrine of miracles. Doubtless it will be added 
that man belongs to ‘the totality of things,” and that God 
does not; that man is in “the vast circle” of nature and 
natural laws, and that God is not. But the answer, we 
reply, is grounded in an assumption, as regards man, that 
is justified by no evidence, and is contradicted even by 
the evidence of consciousness. Man, as a being of free 
will, is no part of nature at all, no arc in the circle of na- 
ture. He belongs, we have abundantly shown, to a high- 
er kingdom and order; having it for his prime distinction 
_ that he acts supernaturally, acts upon the circle of nature 
from without, and never as being determined by the caus- 
alities of nature. All the free intelligences of the unt 


* Discourses of Religion, pp. 269-70. + wife of Josus, Vol. Lp. 72 


BY OPPOSERS OF MIRACLES. 841 


verse are acting on the circle of nature, in this manner, 
and why then may not God Himself? 

But we have another concession that is even more to 
our purpose. Adverting to the fact that the ancient peo- 
ples, especially of the East, begin at God, and gee all 
changes take their spring in his immediate agency, while 
the moderns begin at things, and see all changes come to 
pass, under natural laws, he distinctly rejects the latter, as 
being, by itself, any complete and sufficient view of the 
subject. ‘It must be confessed,” he says, “on nearer in- 
vestigation, that this modern explanation, although it 
does not exactly deny the existence of God, yet puts aside 
the idea of Him, as the ancient view did the idea of the 
world. For this is, as it has often been well remarked, 
no longer a God and Creator, but a mere finite Artist, who 
acts immediately upon his work, only during its first pro- 
duction, and then leaves it to itself; who becomes exclud- 
ed with his full energy from one particular sphere of 
existence.’’* 3 

There is then, he admits, no validity in the modern 
opinion, which assumes that all things take place by force 
of second causes, and without an immediate divine agency. 
Indeed he explicitly acknowledges, on the next page, that 
‘our idea of God requires an immediate, and our idea of 
the world a mediate divine operation.” He only man- 
ages to quite take away the value of the admission, by 
raising the question, how to combine, or settle the relative 
adjustment of the mediate and immediate operation, and by 
so conducting the process as to come out in the conclusion, 
that “God acts upon the world as a whole, immediately; 
but on each part, only by means of his action on every 


_—— 


Life of Jesus, Vol. IL, p. 72. 
20m 


842 ADMISSIONS MADE 


other part,” that is to say, “by the laws of nature.” And 
so miracles are excluded. 

But there is a mistake here, first in his premiscs, and 
next in his conclusion. It is not true that our “idea of 
the world” requires us to hold the faith of a merely “me- 
diate” action of God upon it. Exactly contrary to this, 
the idea of the world, taken as disordered by sin, demands 
his jminediate action. It is not only necessary, in order to 
realize the idea of God, or make room for his practical ex- 
istenee, that we conceive him to have some kind of imme- 
diate action, but the world, under its disorders, asks for it, 
and waits for the restoring grace of it. It is very true 
that if the world, as an organized frame of scientific or- 
der, under second causes, were In no way disturbed by our 
immediate action upon it, there would seem to be no de- 
mand or even place for an immediate operation of God. 
Why should the watchmaker turn the hands of his watch 
directly by the key, when he has made them to go mediate- 
ly by the spring? But this 1s not any true statement of the 
question; the world is in no such state of primal and ideal 
order. Making due account of sin, as our philosophers, 
alas! never do, we have a condition that, for order’s sake, 
asks an intervention of God’s supernatural and powerful 
hand. The world,in fact, was made, to be unmade by sin, 
and become a state of unnature; made to want, thus, inter- 
ventions and immediate operations, to carry it on and bring 
it out, in the final realization of its perfected ends. Evenas 
a watch, being no infallible machine, is submitted to exter- 
nal action, by means of the regulator; and as, without a 
regulator prepared for the immediate touch of some hand, 
it would be no manageable or serviceable thing, so it is the 
particular merit of nature, that it is originally ordered to 


BY OPPOSERS OF MIKAGCLES., 843 


receive the touch of free-will forces from without; first of 
such as are human, and then, as the only sufficient power 
of conservation, of such as are divine. 

‘he error referred to, in the conclusion at whicn Dr, 
Strauss arrives in his analysis, is too obvious to require a 
particular refutation. Enough that any one but a mere 
words-man, will find some difficulty in conceiving how 
God should act “immediately on the whole” of the world, 
without acting immediately on some one, or all of the 
parts. Acting in, or upon some one wheel of a watch, 
the whole action of the watch will be affected; so when 
every wheel is acted on; but what is that immediate ac: 
tion upon the whole of a watch, that does not immediately 
act on any one of the parts? Besides, the argument by 
which all particular action is excluded, would require 
that God should never have begun to act immediately 
any where. Creation is thus philosophically impossible, 
God, therefore, has had nothing to do, but to be chained 
to the wheel from eternity, acting immediately on some 
eternal whole that is self-existent as He; allowed to be- 
gin nothing, vary no part or particle, held by a doom 
to his eternal totality. Is it this which “the idea of 
God” requires, this by which our idea of God is fulfilled? 

On this particular question, however, of an immediate 
and a mediate divine agency, we are not disposed to spend 
a great deal of time. We strongly suspect there is a 
sophism in the question, much as if the inquiry were 
whether God, who is above time, acts in this tense or 
the other? All that we can say with confidence on this 
subject, appears to be that, so far as we can see, it is nec- 
essary for us, under conditions of time, to hold the twa 
sonceptions, of a nature set on foot in some past time, 


344 THE MEDIATE AND IMMEDIATE, 


and a divine force, acting supernaturally upon it now, 
and that God so distributes his action or plan, as to give 
us what will thus accommodate our finite conditions 
Nature, practically viewed and wholly apart from specu- 
lation, is a kind of third quantity between us and God, to 
he reciprocally acted on; so that we can sce what we are 
doing toward Him, and what he 1s doing toward us. It 
is words to the great life-talk of duty, a medium of ac- 
tion and reaction that interprets to us the divine relation- 
ship in which we stand. Laying hold of nature by her laws 
and causes, to build, produce, possess, and also to frame a 
scientific knowledge, we get a footing and a basi of re- 
action for our freedom. If we descend into sin, we set 
the causes of nature in courses of retributive actiun, and 
this reveals what is in our sin. Then, as God will redeem 
us, we are able to see a force entered into nature, which 
is not nature’s force. One may be as truly a divine force 
as the other, but they are yet so ordered as to be relative 
forces to our apprehension, acting one upon, or into, the 
other. In all christian experience, and in times of pray: 
er, we get a divine help, entered into our state, which we 
apprehend distinctly, and with a conscious intelligence, 
as we could not, if all divine agency were homogeneous. 
But while we need, so manifestly, to think God’s agency 
in this manner, under a twofold distribution, it is by no 
means certain that he, from his hight of eternity, classi- 
fies his action, under our finite categories of tense and 
~ relative casuality. It is very certain, as we have already 
shown, that nature is not, to Him, the universal system. 
All his doings, whether past or present, mediate or imme- 
diate, rest in laws of reason, determined by his end, and 
it is in these, uot in the physical laws magnified by Sc 


POSSIBLY A HUMAN DISTINCTION, 346 


ence, that he beholds the real system of his universe. In 
this view, nature may be to him a kine of continuous 
ercation, coalescing, as it flows from his will, in a com- 
mon stream with his supernatural action, and crystallizing 
with it, in the unity of his end. Enough that, to us, a 
conception of his work is given, which better meets our 
fimte conditions. Hnough that we may call it natural and 
supernatural; cause and effect, and miracle; mediate and 
immediate; and that so, without any real error, we may 
have our human want accommodated. The twofold dis- 
tinction is permitted as a practically valid form of thought, 
without which we could have no sense of relationship 
with God, under the experience of life; and, without 
which, nothing done by him, as prior to our sin, in the 
way of judicial arrangement, or posterior, in the way of 
recovery, could ever be intelligible. 

Having noted some of the admissions of the natural- 
izing teachers, we will now proceed to adduce some proofs 
of the christian miracles; or rather to gather up the 
proofs already supphed, by the course of our argument 
itself. 


1. We have seen that man himself acts supernaturally, 
in all his free accountable actions. ‘That is, he acts upon 
the chain of cause and effect in nature, uncaused himself, 
in his action. ‘T'his is no miracle, but it involves all the 
speculative difficulties encountered in miracles. These are 
nothing but acts, every way similar to ours, of God or 
superhuman agents, on the lines of causes in nature; only 
different in effect or degree, as they are different beings 
from us. We have only to suppose that nature is, by 
her very laws, submitted to them as to us, and that is the 


846 ARGUMENTS FOR 


end of all difficulty. We may wonder at their manifest 
ations, and not at our own; but our wonder alters nothing, 
creates no derangement of nature, any more than if we 
were so familiar with such doings, as to experience no won- 
der at all. If the sun darkens, or the earth shudders 
with Christ in his death, that sympathy of nature is just 
as appropriate for hina, as it is for us that our skin should 
blush, or our eye distill its tears, when our sult is upon 
us, or our repentances dissolve us. Jt is not cause 
and effect that blushes, or that weeps, but it is that 
cause and effect are touched by sentiments which connect 
with our freedom. Nature blushes and weeps, because 
she was originally submitted, so far, to our freedom, or 
made to be touched by our actions; but she could not even 
to eternity raise a blush, or a tear of contrition, if we did 
not command her. 

9. Consider how near the fact of sin, which is the act 
of a supernatural human agency, approaches to the rank 
of a miracle. Sia, as we have shown in a previous chap- 
ter, is the acting of a free being as he was not made to act; 
for, if it were the acting of a being under laws of cause 
and effect established by God, then it would Ye no sin. 
God made sin possible, just as he made all lying wonders 
possible, but he never made it a fact, never set any thing 
in his plan to harmonize with it. Therefore it enters the 
world as a forbidden fact, against every thing that God 
has ordained. And then what follows? A general disrup- 
tion of every thing that belongs to the original paradisaic 
order of the creation. The soul itself begins, at the first 
moment, to feel the terrible action of it, and becomes a 
crazed and disordered power. The crystal form of the 
spirit is broken, and it is become an opaque element, a liv- 


MIRACLES. 847 


ing malformation, The conscience is battered and tram: 
pled in its throne. The successions of the thoughts are 
become disorderly and wild; the tempers are out of tune; 
the passions kindle into guilty fires, and burn with a con- 
suming heat; the imagination is a hell of painful, ugly 
phantoms; the body a diseased thing, scarred by deform- 
ity. Society is out of joint, and even the physical world 
itself, as we have shown, is marred in every part by abor- 
tions, deformities visible, and discords audible, so as no 
more to represent the perfect beauty of its author. What 
devil now of confusion has thrown a magnificent creature, 
and a realm of glorious natural order, into so great confu- 
sion? Where are those sovereign laws of beauty and 
order which they tell us nothing can disturb? We care 
not to call sin a miracle. We only say that no one mira- 
cle, nor all miracles, ever heard of or reported, can be im- 
agined to have wrought a thousandth part of the disturb- 
ance actually wrought by sin, the sin of mankind. Who- 
ever then has yielded to the really shallow dogma of ra- 
tionalism, which teaches that cause and effect in nature must 
have their way, fulfilling causes of ideal harmony, and 
forever excluding the possibility of a miracle, need not go 
far to find a corrective. Let it be distinctly noted then— 

8. That what we call nature, and what the mere natu- 
ralists are so bold to assume can not be mended or altered 
by any fnterference of miracle, does in fact no longer ex- 
ist. Sin has so far unmade the world that the divine order 
is broken. The laws are all in action as at the first, never 
discontinued, or annihilated, but the false fact or lying 
wonder of sin, has made false conjunctions of causes, and 
set the currents of causality in a kind of malign activity, 
which displaces forever the proper order of nature. It is 


848 ARGUMENTS FOR 


with nature as with a watch in which some wheel has 
been made eccentric, in its motions, by abuse. The whole 
machine is in disorder, though no one part is wanting. 
It is no longer a watch, or time-keeper, but a jumble of 
useless and absurd motions. So nature, under sin, is no 
longer nature, but a condition of unnature. Yet this it 
is that our scientific naturalism assumes to be the perfect 
order; which not even God may touch by a miracle, with- 


out a breach of its integrity! It is nature, they say, 


and God, who is the God of nature, will not, can not 
touch it, without either consenting to its original im- 
perfection, or producing a general wreck of its perfection. 
Why, the perfection of it is gone long ages ago! From 
the moment, when a substance or power located in it, viz. 
man, began to act as he was not made to act, that is to sin, 
it has been a disordered fabric of necessity. No longer 


does it represent only the beautiful mind of its author, but _ 


quite as often the shame, and discord, and deformity con- 
sequent upon sin. And no man, we are sure, who regards 
it for a moment, will have any the least apprehension that 
a miracle wrought in it, by its author, can be any thing 
but a hopeful sign for its systematic integrity. That he 
would never work a miracle in nature proper, as it came 
from his hands, we are quite willing to admit, but since 
nature is gone, fallen with man in the bad experiment of 
evil, and since it was originally designed to be acted on, 
both by man and by Himself, in a process of training that 


_ carries him through a fall, and brings him out in redemp- 


tion, we see nothing to discourage the faith of miracles, 
but much to prove the contrary. ‘This brings us to 
speak— 

4, Of the fact that, without a pntting forth of the di- 


MIRACLES, 849 


vine power, in some action sovereign as miracle, there 
ean be no reconstruction of the proper order of na 
ture, no recovery of the broken state of man. The laws 
of nature, without him and within, are now running per- 
versely, as laws of sin and death. The crystalline order 
of souls and of the world is broken, and it is plain, at 
a glance, that no being but God, the Almighty, can avail 
to restore the disturbance. The laws have no power ot 
self-rectification, any more than the laws of a disordered 
machine have power to cure the disorder by running. Ag 
certainly therefore as sinners are to be restored, as certain- 
ly, that is, as that all God’s ends in the world and human 
existence are not to fail, there will be, must be, miracles, 
or puttings forth, at least, of a divinely supernatural 
power. very thing in the whole creation is groaning and 
travailing in expectation of so great a redemption. The 
very plan was originally, as we have shown, to bring out 
the grand results of spiritual order and character intended, 
by means of a double administration; that is by the crea- 
tion and the new-creation, the creation disordered by sin, 
the new-creation raised up and glorified by grace and its 
miracles. Go back then a moment— 

5. ‘To things precedent and see what considerations and 
facts may be gathered there. Tirst, we discover, what the 
naturalists and men chiefly occupied with matters of sci- 
ence so generally overlook, the fact that nature never was, 
and never was designed to be, the whole empire of God; 
ihat the final ends of God are not contained in nature at 
all, and that it was appointed by Him‘to be only a means 
to his ends, a mere field for the training of his children. 
Tn this view spiritual creatures, creatures supernatural, com- 


pose the real body and substance of his empire, and to these 
30 


850 ! ARGUMENTS FOR 


nature was to be subjected, by these to be played upon in 


the great life-battle of their trial—disordered by them and — 


restored by Himself. Accordingly it 1s not implied that 
the divine system is, in any degree, marred or broken by 
his miracles. On the contrary, every thing done by Him, 
will be done as fulfilling that system. There is no change, 
no reconsideration, no. breach of unity, but a doing of pre- 
cisely that which was set down to be done at the first. He 
proceeds, in fact, by laws predetermined, in his miracles 
themselves; of course by a perfect and orderly system. 
Observe, again, the fact that God has either never done 
ur can do any thing, or else that he may as well be sup- 
posed to do a miracle now. ‘To create any thing that was 
not, to set any plan on foot that was not on foot, was itself 
a miracle that involved all the difficulties of a miracle sub- 
sequent. To create a scheme called nature and retire to 
see it run, is itself a miracle, and we may just as well sup- 


pose that he continues to work, as that he so began. He — 


has either never done any thing, or else he may do some 
thing now. ‘There is no way to escape the faith of mira 
cles and hold the faith of a personal God and Creator. It 
is only pantheism, or, what is not far different, atheism, 
that can rationally and consistently maintain the impossl- 
bility of miracles. Any religion too absolute to allow the 
faith of miracles, is a religion whose God never did any 
thing, and is therefore no God. 

Again, it is discovered and proved, by science itself, 
that God has performed, at least, one miracle, or class of 
miracles, in the world, previous to the date of human 
existence. We speak of the great geological discovery 
that new races of animals and plants have, at aifferent 
times, been created, and finally man himself. The mere 


a ee eee eee eee 


ee ee ee 


ee ae rr) 


MIRACLES. 85} 


metallic earth, which, at one time, was the all of nature, 
did not make or sprout up into any form of hfe. That 
would be a greater miracle, done by nature, than the rais: 
ing of Lazarus 


as great as if the earth had raised him, 
yea, as great as if the earth had invented and shaped him 
and breathed intelligence into him. Here then is proved 
to us, out of the infallible registers of the rocks, that God 
has sometime wrought a miracle upon nature. And, as 
we said just now, one miracle proved, decides the ques- 
tion; for there may as well be a thousand as one. We 
pass now— ° 

6. To the subject of our last chapter, where we meet a 
proof that concludes all argument. We there showed, 
by a full and critical examination of the character of 
Jesus, that he is plainly not a human character, and can 
not be rightly classed in the genus humanity; also, that 
the character 1s not an invention, but that such a person 
must have lived, else he could not be described; also, that 
being such, in external description, he must have been, 
what he himself claimed to be, a sinless being. Here, 
then, is a being who has broken into the world, and is not 
of it; one who has come out from God, and is even an ex- 
pression to us of the complete beauty of God—such as 
he should be, if he actually was, what he is affirmed to 
be, the Eternal Word of the Father incarnate. Did he 
work miracles? this now is the question that waits for 
our decision—did he work miracles? By the supposition, 
he is superhuman. By the supposition, too, he is in the 
world as a miracle. Agreeing that the laws of nature 
will not be suspended, any more than they are by ow 
own supernatural action, will they yet be so subordinated 
to his power, as to permit the performance ot signs and 


352 THE GRAND ARGUMENT, 


wonders, in which we may recognize a superhuman force] 


Since he is shown to be a superhuman being, manifestly 


ro) ] 

nature will have a relation to him, under and by her own 
laws, such as accords with his superhuman quality, and it 
will be very singular if he does not do superhuman 
things; nay, it is even philosophically incredible that he 
should not. An organ is a certain instrument, curiously 
framed or adjusted in its parts, and prepared to yield 
itself to any force which touches the keys. An animal 
runs back and forth across the key-board, and produces a 
jarring, disagreeable jumble af sounds. Thereupon he 
begins to reason, and convinces himself that it is the na- 
ture of the instrament to make such sounds, and no other, 
But a skillful player comes to the instrument, as a higher 
presence, endowed with a super-animal sense and skill. 
He strikes the keys, and all melodious and heavenly 
sounds roll out upon the enchanted air. Will the animal 
now go on to reason that this is impossible, incredible, 
because it violates the nature of the instrument, and ig 
contrary to his own experience? Perhaps he may, and 
men may sometimes not be wiser than he. Butthe player 
himself, and all that can think it possible for him to do 
what the animal can not, will have no doubt that the 
music is made by the same laws that made the jargon. 
Just so Christ, to whose will or touch our mundane sys- 
tem is pliant as to ours, may be able to execute results 
through its very laws, subordinated to him, which to ug 
are impossible. Nay, it would be itself a contradiction 
of all order and fit relation, if he could not. To suppose 
that a being out of humanity will be shut up within all 
the limitations of humanity, is incredible and contrary to 
reason. The very laws of nature themselves, having him 


THAT CHRIST IS A MIRACLE. Don 


present to them, as a new agent and higher first term, 
would require the development of new consequences and 
incidents in the nature of wonders. Being a miracle him- 
self, it would be the greatest of all miracles if he did not 
work miracles, 

Let it be farther noted, as a consideration important to 
the argument, that Christ is here on an errand high 
enough to justify his appearing, and also of a nature to 
exclude any suspicion that he is going to overthrow the 
order of God’s works. He declares that he has come out 
from God, to be a restorer of sin, a regenerator of all 
things, a new moral creator of the world; thus to do a 
work that is, at once, the hope of all order, and the 
greatest of all miracles. Were he simply juggling with 
our curiosity, in the performance of idle and useless won- 
ders, doing it for money, or to show what is of no conse- 
quence;-as that he is a priest, or has the power of second 
sight, or that the sun shines, or that he is right in assert: 
ing some insignificant opinion, it is allowed that we 
should have no right to believe in him. But he tells us, 
on the contrary, that he is come out from God, to set up 
the kingdom of God, and fulfill the highest ends of the 
divine goodness in the creation of the world itself; and 
the dignity of his work, certified by the dignity also of 
his character, sets all things in proportion, and commends 
him to our confidence in all the wonders he performs. 

But our human supernatural action, it will be suggested, 
is through the body, while the raising of Lazarus dis- 
peuses with all natural media and instruments. And yet, 
as our body is a part of nature, it will be seen that we act 
upon the body as being itself nature, without media be- 


tween it and our will, in the same manner. The relation- 
30* 


/ 


854 AND OUGHT THEREFORE 


ship existing between different orders of being and nature, 
may also vary according to their degree. On this subject 
we know nothing. We can not even say, that, to such a 
being as Christ incarnate in it, the whole realm of physi- 
cal existence was not present as a sensorium, quickened 
by his life. Mere ignorance is not competent here to hold 
an objection. If we can not see how Christ could work 
his miracles, or send his will into things around him, 
there is nothing singular in the fact. There are many 
things that we can not understand. 

Nor shall we apprehend in his miracles any disruption 
of law; for we shall see that he is executing that true 
system, above nature and more comprehensive, which is 
itself the basis of all stability, and contains the real im- 
port of all things. Dwelling from eternity in this higher 
system himself, and having it centered in his person 
wheeling and subordinating thus all physical instruments 
as doubtless he may, to serve those better ends in which 
all order lies, it will not be in us, when he comes forth 
from the Father, on the Father’s errand, to forbid that he 
shall work in the prerogatives of the Father. Visibly not 
one of us, but a visitant who has come out from a realm 
of spiritual majesty, back of the sensuous orb: on which 
our moth-eyes dwell as in congenial dimness and obscurity 
of light, what shall we think when we see diseases fly 
before him, and blindness letting fall the scales of ob- 
scured vision, and death retreating from its prey, but that 
the seeming disruption of our retributive state under sin, 
is made to let in mercy and order from above. For, if 
man has buried himself in sense, ar.d married all sense to 
sin, which sin is itself the soul of all disorder, can it be 
to us a frightful thing that he lays his hand upon the per- 


TO WORK MIRACLES. 85h 


verted causalities, and says, “thou art made whole?” If 
the bad empire, the bitter unnature, of our sin, is some 
where touched by his healing power, must we apprehend 
some fatal shock of disorder? If, by his miraculous 
force, some crevice is made in the senses, to let in the 
hight of heaven’s peace and order, must we tremble lest 
the scientific laws are shaken, and the scientific causes 
violated? Better is it to say—‘ this beginning of miracles 
did Jesus make in Galilee, and manifested forth his glory, 
and we believe in him.” Glory breaks in through his 
incarnate person, to chase away the darkness. In hin, 
peace and order descend to rebuild the realm below, they 
have maintained above. Sin, the damned miracle and 
misery of the groaning creation, yields to the stronger 
miracle of Jesus and his works, and the great good minds 
of this and the upper worlds behold integrity and _ rest 
returning, and the peace of universal empire secure. Out 
of the disorder that was, rises order; out of chaos, beauty. 
Amen! Alleluia! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! 

Once more, it is a powerful evidence for the historic 
verity of the Christian miracles, that their deniers can 
make no account of them, as reported in the christian nar- 
ratives, which is rational or even credible. Dr. Strauss 
maintains that they are myths or legendary tales, that 
grew up out of the story-telling and marveling habit of 
the disciples of Christ, within the first thirty years afier 
their Master’s death, at which time many of the eye-wit- 
nesses of the miracles were stil! living. That such a con- 
version of history into fable should have taken place 1n 
the traditions of a much longer period of time, is nut 4m- 
possible. But he is compelled to shorten his time in this 
manner, as it would seem, because there 1s. no allusion 


356 NO OTHER ACCOUNT 


made in the gospels to the fall of Jerusalem as an accom- 
plished fact. For, had they heen written after the over. 
throw by Titus, it is inconceivable that his name should 
not have been mentioned in those chapters cf the gospels 
that foretell the overthrow, and also that the shocking 
scenes of the siege, should not have been even too distinetly 
described. On the supposition, too, that the first age of 
discipleship was fertile enough in the mythical tendency, to 
have generated so many miraculous stories, within the short 
period of thirty years, this grand catastroghe of the na- 
tion must have been set off with a profuse garnish of 
fictions, and Christ himself, coming in the clouds of heaven 
to be the avenger of the cross, must have had such prom- 
inence in the transaction, as to quite leave the Roman 
commander in the shade. Hence the necessity that so 
short a time should be fixed. And thus we are required 
to believe that all these myths were developed and re- 
corded in the lifetime of the eye-witnesses of Christ’s 
ministry, and some of them recorded by eye-witnesses 
themselves. The faith of miracles, we think, would be 
somewhat easier than this. And still the difficulty is 
farther increased by the fact that the epistles, the genuine- 
ness of which is indisputable, present exactly the same 
Christ, and refer to the same miracles, in a manner clear 
of all pretense of myth or extravagance. 

But the mythologic hypothesis of this critic breaks 
down more fatally, if possible, in the necessary implica- 
tion, that four common men are able to preserve such a 
character as that of Christ, while loading down the history 
thus, with so many mythical wonders that are the garb of 
their very grotesque and childish credulity. By what 
accident, we are compelled to ask, was an age of myths 


ai 


OF THE MIRACLES 357 


and fables able to develop and set forth the only concep- 
tion of a perfect character ever known in our world? 
Were these four mythologic dreamers, believing thei 
own dreams and ail others beside, the men to produce the 
perfect character of Jesus and a system of teachings that 
transcend all other teachings ever given to the race? If 
there be a greater miracle, or a tax on human credulity 
more severe, we know not where it is. Nothing is so dif- 
ficult, all human literature testifies, as to draw a character, 
and keep it in its hving proportions. How much more to 
draw a perfect character, and not discolor it fatally by 
marks from the imperfection of the biographer. How is 
it, then, that four humble men, in an age of marvels and 
Rabbinical exaggerations, have done it—done what none, 
not even the wisest and greatest of mankind, have ever 
been able to do? 

So far, even Mr. Parker concedes the right of my argu- 
ment. ‘ Measure,” he says, ‘the religious doctrine of 
Jesus by that of the time and place he lived in, or that 
of any time and any place. Yes, by the doctrine of eter- 
nal truth. Consider what a work his words and deeds 
have wrought in the world. Remember that the greatest 
minds have seen no farther, and added nothing to the doe- 
trine of religion; that the richest hearts have felt na 
deeper, and added nothing to the sentiment of religion; 
have set no loftier aim, no truer method than his, of per- 
fect love to God and man. Measure him by the shadow 
he has cast into the world—no, by the light he has shed 
upon it. Shall we be told such a man never lived? the 
whole story isa lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton 
never lived. But who did their wonders, and thought 
their thought? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. 


3858 IS TENABLE. 


What man could have fabricated a Jusus? None but a 
Jesus.”* | 

Exactly so. And yet,in the middle of the very para- 
graph from which these words are gleaned, Mr. Parkei 
says, “‘ We can learn few facts about Jesus;” also, that in 
certain things—to wit, his miracles, we suppose—“ Hercules 
was his equal, and Vishnu his superior.” Few facts about 
Jesus! all the miracles recited of him, as destitute of cred- 
ibility as the stories of Hercules and Vishnu! And yet 
these evangelists, retailing so many absurd fictions and so 
much childish gossip, have been able to give us a doctrine 
upon which the world has never advanced, a character so 
deep that the richest hearts have felt nothing deeper, and 
added nothing to the sentiment of it. They have done, 
that is, the difficult thing, and broken down under the 
easy! preserved, in the life and discourses of Jesus, what 
exceeds all human philosophy, all mortal beauty, and yet 
have not been able to recite the simplest facts! Is it so 
that any intelligent critic will reason? Suppose, if it 
please, that they are not infallible in their narrative, for 
we have not proved them to be. Still, as we would trust a 
carrier who has brought us a case of the rarest diamonds, 
set in the frailest and most delicate tissues, proving at 
once his capacity and his honest fidelity to his trust, so 
much more will we trust these simple men, who have 
given us the perfect life of Jesus, discolored by no stain 
from their own fond prejudices and weaker infirmities, 
Nor, if this carrier may have once stumbled at our 
door, when bringing us some bundle of meaner con- 
sequence, do we set him down, after bringing us the 
casket safely, as one who is unreliable in these common 


* Life of Jesus, p. 363 


OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 859 


errands, No more can we set down our evangelists, as 
unreliable in matters of fact, after they have brought us 
the glorious, self-evidencing character of Jesus, even 
though, to suppose the worst, they should be suspected, 
once or twice, of mistake, in the external facts of his 
ministry. But there are objections to be considered. 


Hirst objection. That if the miracles of Christ are to 
Le believed, why not those also of Hercules and Vishnu, 
and the ecclesiastical miracles of the Papal church? Un. 
doubtedly they must be, if they are wrought by such a 
character as Jesus, engaged in such a work. But it is 
rather too much to insist that, because we take good 
money, we ought therefore in consistency to take counter- 
feit money. If it be said that the Popish miracles are as 
well attested as those of Jesus, we have made nothing at 
all, let it be observed, of the mere testimony of witnesses. 
We have proved the witnesses by that which stands in 
glorious self-evidence before us, and not the miracles by 
the mere testimony of the witnesses. We will believe 
the miracles also of Hercules, when Hercules is seen, by 
the holy beauty of his perfect character, to have certainly 
come out from God. So, too, we might well enough 
agree to believe the miracles of the apocryphal gospels, 
that, for example, of the Infancy of Jesus, could the 
writer only manage to give us the character of that in- 
fancy, without reducing it to a disgusting picture of pet- 
tishness and passion. Until then, we must discover, in 
what is called his gospel, how certain it is that the pen 
which gives us only myths and marvels, for the facts of a 
perfect liistory, will give us, for a perfect character, what is 
wilder still and more absurd. 


860 OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 


Second objection. That, according to our definition, 
there may be false miracles. ‘That is certainly the doe: 
trine of scripture. Neither is there any thing essentially 
incredible in it. They are wrought, of course, by no con- 
currence of divine power, but only by such power as he- 
lorgs to the grade of the spirit by whom they are 
wrought—by “him whose coming is with signs and lying 
wonders,” ‘by the spirits of devils, working miracles.” 
According to our definition, any invisible spirit, who can 
do what is superhuman, can do a miracle. ‘That there are 
invisible spirits, we have no doubt, and what kind of ae- 
cess they may have to nature, in what manner qualified 
or restrained, we do not know. But it will never be difh- 
cult to distmguish their prodigies and freaks of mischief 
from any divine operation. Their character will be evi 
dent in their works, and no one that loves the divine truth 
will ever be taken by their impostures. We express na 
opinion of the utterances and other demonstrations which 
many are accepting in our times, as the effusions of spirits 
—they are beyond our range of acquaintance. We say 
that if these things are really done, or communicated, by 
spirits, then they are miracles, bad miracles, of course; 
and thus we have it established as a curious phenomenon, 
that the men who are boasting their rejection of all divine 
miracles, are themselves deepest in the faith of those 
which are wrought by demons. Nor is it impossible that 
God has suffered this late irruption of lying spirits, to be 
at once the punishment and the rectification of that shal: 
low unbelief which distinguishes our age—thus to shame 
the absurd folly of what is here called science, and bring: 
us back to a true faith in the spiritual realities and powers 
of a supernatural kingdom. 


OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 86] 


Third objection. That if miracles are credible in any 
particular time or age, that, for example, of the New Tes. 
tameut, they must be now and always credible. To this 
we answer that they are now and always credible. But it 
does not follow that they are now and always a fact. 
That must depend upon historic evidence. The scriptures 
nowhere teach, what is often assumed, the final discontinu- 
ance of miracles, and it is much to be regretted that such 
an assumption is so commonly made, for when it is taken 
for an authorized doctrine, that God will no more allow 
any real miracle to be wrought, since the apostolic times, 
it renders even the New Testament miracles just so much 
more difficult to be believed. There is no certain proof 
that miracles have not been wrought in every age of the 
christian church. There is certainly a supernatural and 
divine causality streaming into the lives and blending 
with the faith of all good men, and there is no reason to 
doubt that it may sometimes issue in premonitions, results 
of guidance and healing, endowments of force, answers to 
prayer that closely approach, in many cases, if they do not 
exactly meet, our definition of miracles. 

We answer again that if miracles have been discontin- 
ued, even for a thousand years, they may yet be revived 
in such varieties of form, as a different age may re- 
quire. They will be revived without fail, whenever the 
ancient reason may return, or any new contingency may 
occur, demanding their instrumentality. 

And yet, again, we answer that there may have been 
good and sufficient reasons why the more palpable mira- 
cles of the apostolic age could not be continued, or must 
needs be interspaced by agencies of a more silent charac- 


ter. It may have been that they would by and by cor. 
3] 


3862 OBJECLIONS CONSIDERED. 


rupt the impressions and ideas even of religion, setting 
men to look after signs and prodigies with their cyés, in- 
ducing a contempt of every thing else, and so, instead of 
attesting God to men, making them unspiritual and even 
incapable of faith. Traces of this mischief begin to ap- 
pear even in the times of the apostles themselves. There- 
fore, when the fire is kindled, the smoke, it may be, ceas- 
es; or rather it becomes transparent, so that we do not so 
readily see it, though it is there. Christianity, it is very 
obvious, inaugurates the faith of a supernatural agency in 
the world. It is either supernatural or it is a nullity. 
Hence, to inaugurate such a faith, it must needs make its 
entry into the world, through the fact of a divine incarna- 
tion and other miracles. In these we have the pole of 
thought, opposite to nature, set before us in distinct exhibi- 
tion. And then the problem is, having the two poles of 
nature and the supernatural presented, that we be trained 
to apprelfend them conjunctively, or as working together 
in silent terms of order. For, if the miracles continue in 
their palpable and staring forms of wonder, and take their 
footing as a permanent institution, they will breed a sens- 
uous, desultory state of mind, opposite to all sobriety and 
all genuine intelligence. The invalid will now pray to be 


healed by pure miracle, and will never learn or be taught 


how to pray, in a manner that contemplates a unifying 
of the supernatural force with nature and the system of 
nataral causes. At a certain point the miracles were need- 
ed as the polar signs of anew force, but, for the reason sug- 
gested, it appears to be necessary, als, that they should not 
be continuous; otherwise the supernatural will never be 
thought into any terms of order, as a force conjoined with 
nature in our common experience, but will only insti- 


OBJECTIONS .CONSIDERED. 863 


gate a wild, eccentric temper, closely akin to unreason, 
and to all practical delusion. And yet there may be 
times, even to the end of the world, when some outburst 
of the miraculous force of God will be needed to break 
up a lethargy of unbelief and sensuous dullness, equally 
unreasoning and delusory. 

Fourth objection. That whatever may be true of mir- 
acles in other respects, they are only demonstrations of 
force; therefore, having in themselves no moral quality, 
there is no rational, or valuable, or even proper place for 
them in a gospel, considered as a new-creating grace for 
the world. To this we answer that it is a thing of no see- 
ondary importance for a sinner,down under sin, and held 
fast in its bitter terms of bondage, to see that God has en- 
tered into his case with a force that is adequate. These 
mighty works of Jesus, which have been done and duly 
certified, are fit expressions to us of the fact that he can 
do for us all that we want. Doubtless it is a great and 
difficult thing to regenerate a fallen nature; no person, re- 
ally awake to his miserable and dreadful bondage, ever 
thought otherwise. But he that touched the blind eyes 
and commanded the leprosy away, he that trod the sea, and 
raised the dead, and burst the bars of death himself, can 
tame the passions, sweeten the bitter affections, regenerate 
the inbred diseases, and roll back all the storms of the 
mind, Assured in this manner by his miracles, they be- 
come arguments of trust, a storehouse of powerful images, 
that invigorate courage and stimulate hope. Broken 
as we are by our sorrow, cast down as we are by our 
guiltiness, ashamed, and weak and ready to despair, we 
can yet venture a hope that our great soul-miracle may be 
done ; that, if we can but touch the hem of Christ’s gar- 


364 OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 


ment, a virtue will go out of him to heal us. In all dark 
days and darker struggles of the mind, in all outward 
disasters, and amid all storms upon the sea of life, we can 
yet descry him treading the billows and hear him saying, 
“Tt is I, be not afraid.” And lest we should believe the 
miracles faintly, for there is a busy. infidel lurking always 
in our hearts to cheat us of our faith, when he can not rea- 
3on it away, the character of Jesus is ever shining with 
and through them, in clear self-evidence, leaving them 
never to stand as raw wonders only of might, but covering ~ 
them with glory, as tokens of a heavenly love, and acts 
that only suit the proportions of his personal greatness and 
majesty. 
There are many in our day, as we know, who, without 
making any speculative point of the objection we are dis. 
cussing, have so far yielded to the current misbelief as to 
profess, with a certain air of self-compliment, that they are 
quite content to accept the spirit of Jesus; and let the mir- 
acles go for what they are worth. Little figure will they 
make as christians in that kind of gospel. They will not, 
in fact, receive the spirit of Jesus; for that unabridged is - 
itself the Grand Miracle of Christianity, about which all 
the others play as scintillations only of the central. fire. 
still less will they believe that Jesus can do any thing in 
them which their sin requires. They will only compli- 
ment his beauty, imitate or ape his ways in a feeble lift: 
ing of themselves, but that he can roll back the currents 
of nature, loosened by the disorders of sin, and raise them 
to a new birth in holiness, they will not believe. No such 
watery gospel of imitation, separated from grace, will have 
any living power in their life, or set them in any bond of 
unity with God. Nothing but to say—‘ Jesus of Nazareth, 


CHRIST THE TRUE EVIDENCE 865 


aman approved of God by miracles and signs which God 
did by him”—can draw the soul to faith and open it to the 
power of a supernatural and new-creative mercy. 

We come back then, in closing, to the grand first prin 
ciple of evidence, and there we rest. The character and 
doctrine of Jesus are the sun that holds all the minor orbs 
of revelation to their places, and pours a sovereign self. 
evidencing light into all religious knowledge. We have 
been debating much, and ranging over a wide field, in 
chase of the many phantoms of doubt and false argument, 
still we have not far to go for hght, if only we could cease 
debating and sit down to see. It is no ingenious fetches 
of argument that we want; no external testimony, gath- 
ered here and there from the records of past ages, suffices 
to end our doubts; but it is the new sense opened in us | 
by Jesus himself—~a sense deeper than words and more im- 
mediate than inference—of the miraculous grandeur of his 
life; a glorious agreement felt between his works and his 
person, such that his miracles themselves are proved to us 
in our feeling, believed in by that inward testimony. On 
this inward testimony we are willing to stake every thing, 
even the life that now is, and that which is to come. If 
the miracles, if revelation itself, can not stand upon the 
superhuman character of Jesus, then let it fall. If that 
character does not contain all truth and centralize all truth 
in itself, then let there be no truth. If there is any thing 
worthy of belief not found in this, we may well consent 
to live and die without it. Before this sovereign light, 
streaming out from God, the deep questions, and dark sur- 
mises, and doubts unresolved, which make a night so 
gloomy and terrible about us, hurry away to their native 


abyss. God. who commanded the light to shine out of 
) 31* 


666 IN HIM WE REST. 


darkness, hath shined in our hearts to give the hght of 
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ. This it is that has conquered the assaults of doubt 
and false learning in all past ages, and will in all ages to 
come. No argument against the sun will drive it from 
the sky. No mole-eyed skepticism, dazzled by its bright 
ness, can turn away the shining it refuses to look upon. 
And they who long after God, will be ever turning their 
eyes thitherward, and either with reason or without reason, 
or, if need be, against manifold impediments of reason, 
wil! see and believe. 


Ss 


CHAPTER XII. 


WATER-MARKS IN THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 


TuErE is no kind of evidence that is so convincing or 
is received with so great satisfaction, as that which, after 
long and doubtful search, is suddenly discovered to have 
all the while been on: hand, incorporated, though unob- 
served, in the very subject matter of inquiry. Thus, for 
example, a suit upon a note of hand had long been pend- 
ing in one of the courts of our commonwealth, payment 
of which was resisted, on the ground that it was and must 
be a forgery, no such note having ever been given. But 
the difficulty was, in the trial, to make out any conclusive 
evidence of what the defending party knew to be the 
truth. His counsel was, in fact, despairing utterly ot 
success; but it happened that, just as he was about 
closing his plea, having the note in his hand, and bringing 
it-up, in the motion of his hand, so that the hght struck 
through, his eye caught the glimpse of a mark in the pe 
per. He stopped, held it up deliberately to the light, and 
behold the name, in water-mark, of a company that had 
begun the manufacture of paper after the date of the in- 
strument! Here was evidence, without going far to seek 
it evidence enough to turn the plaintiff forthwith ito a 
felon, and consign him, as it did, to a felon’s punishment. 

Just so there is, we now propose to show, a certain 
divine water-mark in the christian doctrine, which, wheth- 
er we see it or not, is there, waiting, at all times, to be 
seen, and to give to all who will look for it, indubitable 
proof of its supernatural and divine origin. 


868 A DISTINCTION OF CHRISTIANITY’. 


And, first of all, we select: for an example, or principal 
instance, the grand comprehensive distinction of the chris- 
tian system, viz., the assumption it every where makes of 
a necessarily twofold economy in the training of souls, 
This assumption, or assumed necessity, appears and reap- 
pears on almost every page of the New Testament. ‘The 
two economies are “two covenants;” two ministrations ; 
‘(a ministration of condemnation,” and a “ ministration of 
righteousness;” ‘law and grace;” ‘bondage and lib- 
erty;” ‘the letter that killeth, and the spirit that giveth 
life;” ‘the law that makes nothing perfect;” and 
“charity which is the bond of perfectness.” 

We have spoken already* of this twofold process in the 
training of a soul, and shown the privative condition it 1s 
necessar ily 3 in, till it has passed through the first stage or 
economy, and come forth in the second. Our object here, 
in recurring to the subject, is different; viz., to show the 
remarkable advantage Christianity, or the christian gospel 
has, in the positive and deliberate recognition of a truth 
so plainly fundamental, and one that, as soon as it is defi- 
nitely stated, inevitably verifies itself and becomes an im- 
movable conviction in every thoughtful mind. Christian- 
ity is just here quite alone; alone, that is, in the deepest 
and most radical of all conceptions that pertain to the dis- 
cipline of virtue; alone, that is, in perceiving beforehand 
the necessary duality of the process, and conforming itself 
deliberately to what is required, in the preparation of a 
grand dual economy. In this fact all the human philoso- 
phers are left behind. Tor, while the christian scriptures 
are so forward, and full, and explicit, in asserting the two 
testaments, and displaying their relative use and power, 


— 


* Chapter 1V., p. 117. 


THE DUAL ECONOMY OF VIRTUE, 369 


throwing themselves out boldly on their doctrine, in the 
noble confidence of truth, the philosophers do not appear, 
as yet, even to have had their attention attracted to the 
question. Such of them as were educated under Chris- 
tianity, appear to have regarded its manfold representa- 
tions of letter and spirit, law and grace, a ministration 
of condemnation and a ministration of righteousness, as 
the unmeaning jingle or pious cant only of revelation; 
entitled, in that view, to no philosophic respect. Indeed 
it is not a little remarkable, that some of the heathen phi- 
losophers appear to have approached the christian doctrine 
more closely than they. 

Our christian philosophers, so called—christian, not be- 
cause they teach any thing that deserves the name, but 
because they are born in christian countries—commonly 
begin with man as being simply a conscious intelligence, 
coneciving him to be in his proper normal state, and to 
have, in that view, certain susceptibilities to virtue; a 
conscience, a free will, a power of doing good and receiv- 
ing injury. Then, ignoring, as a fact of no consequence, 
the abnormal and diseased state of sin, they go on to build 
up their schemes of ethical practice; showing what the. 
foundations of virtue may be, and upon those foundations 
erecting their codes of observance. But as they never al- 
low themseives to look on the fact of depravity, and the 
consequent state of psychological disorder, so they never 
trouble themselves about any such superlative notions of 
virtuous living, as respect the perfection and final beati- 
tude of the soul. Their concern is simply to determine 
the authority of what is called virtue, and show the mat- 
ters of good behavior that are binding on men, in the 
relations of domestic, social, and public life. They incul- 


370 THE DUAL ECONOMY OF VIRTUB, 


vate nothing but legalities. It is virtue enough to do the 
right things, no matter whether they are done grudgingly 
and by hard constraint, or willingly, cheerfully, and 
gladly, as the spontaneous tribute of a full and ready 
heart; no matter, indeed, whether it be only the doing of 
some right things, such as concern human society, leaving 
out the duties owed-to God, or whether it include all duty 
and so the possibility of a principle! Meager, sad-look- 
ing impostures, these ethical esis that bear the name 
of philosophy! 

But the heathen philosophers, as we have already inti- 
mated, often do better. It is not any part of philosophy 
with them, to steer wide of the truths of Christianity, 
and ignore all the great questions of revealed religion. 
Their ignorance of Christianity delivers them of any 
such feeble and absurd jealousy. Accordingly they go 
directly into the great and solemn problems of human 
existence, with a free mind, and a universal aim. They” 
take up the question of evil. They recognize, in the full- 
est manner, as we have shown already, the depravity of 
human nature, and the state of general distemper pro- 
duced by sin. They recognize also the sense of bondage 
encountered by every soul, in its endeavors to resume self- 
government, and re-establish the harmony of virtue. 
They go farther, they conceive a new and higher state of 
possible assimilation to God, or the gods, which they cel- 
ebrate as the liberty of virtue. Thus Plato shows that 
“the more conformed the soul is to the Divine Will, so’ 
much the more perfect and free it is.’* Hvyen Aristotle 
recognizes the necessity of freedom in virtuous exercises, 
as being the only sufficient ground of stability in them, 


* Leg. 4. 


A DISTINCTION .OF CHRISTIANITY. Si 


“because blessed souls live and dwell always in such ex- 
ercises, without tediousness or staleness of mind.”* Epie- 
tetus, in like manner, shows that “submitting the mind 
to the mind that governs all things, as good citizens to 
the law, is perfect liberty.”+ And Seneca coincides with 
all such testimonies, in the declaration ‘that 1t is a oreat 
and free mind that has given itself up to God.” It could 
also be shown, by abundant citations, that they even dis- 
allowed the name of virtue to any merely legal or con- 
strained practice. Having advanced so far, in the right 
direction, we almost look to see them taking up the im- 
pression of some necessary twofold process, in the grand 
economy of virtue. But they are in a limitation. The 
assimilation to God, in which they rest their hope of lib- 
erty, or the complete state of virtue, is not prepared by a 
gospel and a new, supernatural, and redemptive move- 
ment, but only, as they conceive, by an application of 
- their minds to God. ‘The philosopher,” says Plato, 
“conversing with what is divine and excellent, becomes, 
as far as what is human may, divine and excellent.’ 
Again, “Assimilation to God, in righteousness and holi- 
ness, is the result of wisdom or philosophy.”§ They had 
no conception, therefore, of two ministrations, and could 
not be expected, under a scheme of truth so deficient, to 
take up the yet deeper conception of a necessarily two- 
fold process, in the economy of virtue. As the christian 
philosophers have never taken the hint of this antecedent 
necessity, from the manifold declarations of the scripture, 
50 these others have fallen short of it, because they had 
nothing to yield them such a hint. 
And yet how easy it seems, having the hint of it once 


- oer" ae ao 


S Mitts 17. Tey, Un 10; ¢In Arrian, 1: 2. t Repub. $ Theatet. 


372 THE CUAL ECONOMY OF VIRTUR, 


given, to verify this necessity! Though no one of the 
philosophers was ever able to take up such a concertion, 
it requires no philosopher, when it is once given, but only 
a thoughtful man, to perceive the certain truth of it. If 
(1.) there is to be a moral regimen set up in souls, it must 
begin with law, or imposed obligation ; no matter whether it 
be only pronounced in the conscience, or outwardly aiso in 
a revelation. Again, (2.) it is equally plain that mere law 
can bring nothing to perfection. The experiment of dis- 
obedience will be tried. The very motive it supples to 
virtue, viz., retribution, makes the virtue wearisome, and 
a burden certain to be cast off. It has no motivity that 
generates liberty ; on the contrary, the motivity it has, ap- 
pealing only to interest, detains from hberty. And yet, 
(8.) the law, it is equally manifest, will be a necessary 
condition, or first stage in the process of holy training. 
It will impress the sense of law, as a condition of well- 
being. It will also develop the knowledge of sin—what it 
is, and does, and deserves. And the bondage it creates, 
or which is created under it, the hopelessness, the death, 
will prepare the want of a deliverer. The regimen of ab- 
stract law, again, (4.) is, in this view, seen to be inherently 
faulty, even though the precept be perfect ; hence that noth- 
ing but a personal homage, or faith in a divine person-— 
whose character and life, embraced in love, suppose the 
embrace of all law—can finally bring in its principle, and 
establish it in the liberty of an eternal and celestial love. 
See, then, how distinctl: all this and more is said in 
the Christian documents. Hold them up to the light, and 
let fhe divine water-mark, or inwrought signature of God, 
appear! Whence comes it that these gospels and epistles, 
clothed in no pomp of philosophy, and decked with na 


A 
d 
: 


A DISTINCTION OF CHRISTIANITY. Bia 


literary pretensions, so far transcend all the philosophy of 
all ages, opening up deeper truths regarding the great 
problem of human existence, than have any where else 
been discovered to the thought of man? They te!l us, in 
the utmost simplicity of manner, and with no air of dis- 
covery, that God has two ministrations for us, letter and 
spirit, law and grace. As regards the first, they tell us 
that it is a fundamental and first fact in God’s economy, 
no jot or tittle of which can ever fail—a perfect law, and 
so the basis, or formal idea, of all perfection. Yet, as an 
abstraction, commanded by authority, and enforced by 
power, it makes nothing perfect. It is only a schoolmas- 
ter, that sets the training on foot, and brings it on a single 
stage. It is more unfortunate, however, than most school- 
masters, for the stage it prepares is one of loss and defeat, 
and not of gain—ordained to be unto life, it is found ta 
be unto death. It is a ministration of condemnation. It 
is the letter that killeth. It entered that the offense might 
abound. Weak through the flesh, it accomplishes noth- 
ing but a state of bondage, and the loosing of retributive 
causes that set the whole creation groaning and travailing 
in pain together. And all this, we perceive, was under- 
stood as well at the beginning as afterward. For, if there 
had been a law given that could have given life, then 
verily righteousness should have been by the law. But 
that was inherently impossible, and the impossibility ig 
recognized from the first. The legal state was instituted, 
not as a finality, but as a first stage in the process of 
training; to develop the sense of guilt and spiritual want, 
to beget a knowledge of sin, its exceeding sinfulness, and 
the insupportable bondage it creates. And then appears, 


in the person of the incarnate Redeemer a new and 
352 


874 THE DUAL ECONOMY OF VIRTUE, 


higher ministration, designed, from. the foundation of the 
world, to complement, or even in superseding, to establish 
the other. Now he hath obtained a more excellent 
ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better 
eovenant, which was established upon better promises. 
For, if that first covenant had been faultless, then should 
no place have been sought for the second. Now it is no 
more a question of works; there never could have been a 
rational expectation of human perfection on that basis; 
but it is a question of simple faith. The righteousness 
of God without, or apart from the law, is now manifested, 
even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus 
Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe. What 
we call our virtue now is no more a will-work, or a some- 
thing done according to law, but it is a continuous and 
living ingeneration of God, who has thus become a divine 
impulse or quickening in us, and so the life of our 
life. Therefore now we are free. Embracing the person 
of Christ, and yielding the homage of our hearts to him, 
we do, in fact, resume the law, in our deliverance from its 
bondage. We keep his commandments, because we ad- 
here to his person, and we enter thus into a liberty that 
fulfills all law, the liberty of love. There is therefore 
now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. 
For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made 
ns free from the law of sin and death. For what the law 
eould not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, 
sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and 
for sin. condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness 
of the law [7. e., of the precept, | might be fulfilled in us, 
who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. The 

bondage now is gone. The stage of liberty is come. This 


A DISTINCYION OF CHRISTIANITY. 875 


is the Spirit that giveth life. This is the ministration of 
righteousness. And if the ministration of condemnation 
be glorious, much more doth the ministration of righteous: 
ness exceed in glory. 

This exposition of the two ministrations we have given 
as nearly as possible in the language of scripture. Not 
to be struck by the magnificence of the thought, would 
aroue great dullness. All known speculations of philos- 
ophy regarding the moral economy of human life, sink 
into littleness and utter incompetency by the side of it. 

A very curious question, then, it is, whence came this 
doctrine, and what should have set any writer, or any 
christian school of writers, on the conception of it? Why 
does it appear in the scriptures of the New Testament, 
and nowhere else? It has, at first, a canting sound, it 
wears a strange, peculiar air, and comes to us in strange, 
halfmystic words—‘“ letter” and “spirit,” “law” and 
‘“orace,” two “covenants,” two ‘testaments,” two “min- 
istrations”—but it grows under inspection, fills itself out 
in the sublimity of its reasons, and finally stands confessed 
as the only adequate, the only true and real philosophy. 
It is no crude suggestion, or new thought half discovered. 
‘It is fully wrought out; all the points are stated. Every 
thing is set in complete working order; yet with no pa- 
rade of science or of definition, and, as it were, no con- 
sciousness of the transcendent superiority it reveals, 
Whence, then, came it? that is the question. And there 
is but one‘answer. We could sooner believe that Plato's 
dialogues were written by some wild herdsman of Scythia, 
than that this grand distinctive doctrine of the scripture 
is of human invention. It bears the eternal water-mark 
of divinity, and that ends all inquiry. 


76 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


We pass on now to observe another most impressive 
distinction of Christianity, in what may be called the 
crouping of its ideas; and especially the fact that they 
group themselves in such beautiful order and harmony 
about the grand, supernatural fact of the incarnation. 
That it is a fact supernatural in its form, will not be de: 
nied; this indeed is one of the chief grounds of impeach: 
ment against the gospels. It will also be agreed, that if 
any such divine movement is really inaugurated in the 
world, there needs to be also a whole system of ideas and 
doctrines, springing forth and grouping themselves in or- 
der round it. Otherwise we have no sufficient instrument- 
ation, for our human use or handling of so great a fact, and 
our personal appropriation of it—no fit medium of thought 
respecting 1t. 

Here then we discover, again, upon a large scale, the 
secret evidence of a higher presence in the gospel. ‘To 
frame such a fitting of ideas and doctrines, by human in- 
vention, out of the materials of natural sagacity and rew 
son, we may fairly say is impossible. ‘There have been as 
many as nine avatars or incarnations, the Bramins tell us, 
of their god Vishnu; and multitudes of incarnations can be 
cited, from the various pagan mythologies; but when has 
there been developed, round the pretended supernatural 
fact, any scheme of ideas or truths, internally agreeing with 
it and having their roots of life in it? It is a very easy 
thing, we may admit, to imagine a supernatural fact, an 
incarnation for example, but to fit 1t with a range of doce- 
-trines and holy ideas, such as will connect it with human 
experience and make it practical, is what no mortal wis: 
dom was ever able to do. Thus, if there were given the 
fact of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, or his miraculous 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE 377 


birth as the Son of Mary, there is no philosopher of inan- 
kind who could invent, around that central fact, a system 
of ideas and doctrines that would not, by their wild ex- 
travagance, and also by their manifest want of any vital 
agreement or coherence with it, turn it into mockery. 
Much less could he form a vehicle of doctrine, that would 
make that central fact a power, in the practical life, and 
dovetail it into the experience of mankind. 

But all this we shall see accomplished, in the easiest and 
nost natural manner possible in the christian doctrine. 
And this is the line of our argument; that all the capital 
points or ideas of Christianity, frame into the supernatu- 
ral, on one hand, in such beautiful order and facility, and 
without any strain of contrivance or logical adaptation ; 
and into human experience, on the other, in a way so con- 
sonant to the dignity of reason, and the wants and disa- 
bilities of sin, that the signature of God is plainly legible 
in the documents. The examples to be eited are numer- 
ous, and we set them forth under numerical notations. 

1, The new religion, or that of the divine advent, is 
called a gospel. Why a gospel more than a wisdom, or 
philosophy, or doctrine? These, and such like, are the 
names assumed by all the world’s great teachers; but it 
occurs to none of them to call their utterance, whatever it 
be, good news or a gospel. Whence the distinction? Tt 
grows out of the simple fact that they offer a doctrine 
drawn out of premises in nature, and the contents of natu- 
ral reason, a doctrine which, being in those premises, is 
already given, and only waits to be deduced. Whereas, 
Christ comes into the world from without, and above it, 
and brings in with him new premises, not here before, 


He is therefore proclaimed as news, good news— behold 
327 


278 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


U bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all 
people.” Christ also conceives himself and his wok 


in the same manner—‘ Go ye into all the world and preach 
the gospel to every creature.” THis apostles all follow tes- 
tifying the fact, as new tidings—‘‘God was in Christ re: 


conciling the world unto himself.” If it should be said 


that the work of Christ is called a gospel by mere natural . 


suggestion, because it is a real communication from an- 
other world to this, we care not to object, because the 
term is thus accounted for in a way that supposes the fact 
of a supernatural mission; though, if the supposed mis- 
sion were a fact given, it is doubtful whether any human 
skill, left to itself, would ever suit the fact with a name 
that so exactly corresponds with its peculiarity, as a fact 
appearing in the world, but not of it. It would be called 
by any other name, probably, as soon as by the name gos- 
pel, and if some name in great repute with men were at 
hand, such as woald mark it with a special honor, prob- 
ably sooner. But suppose there were no supernatural fact 
at all in the case, and that all we find of that character in 
the work were reducible to myth, or quite explained away 
by a rationalistic interpretation. Whence, in that view, 
will the name gospel come? If there is no supernatural 
fact at all, nor any thing more than a pretense of it, who 
is going to handle even that fiction so nicely, as to fit it 
with the very peculiar name, gospel 7 

2. We have another of the radical notions of this gos- 
pel presented in the word salvation. The work is called a 
salvation. The incarnate Word is named Jesus, by antic- 
ipation; because he will save the people from their sins, 
He declares finally, that he came to seek and to save, and 
his work is published, after he is gone, as the grace of 


4 
: 
j 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 379 


God that bringeth salvation. Meantime no human teacher 
has ever come to men with any thing called by that name. 
The human teachers come with disquisitions, theories, phi- 
losophies, pedagogies, schemes of reformation, ideal repub- 
lies, doctrines of association. But they, none of them, 
speak of saivation. And that, for the simple reason, that 
they have.not conceived the state of unnature under sin, 
as a really lost or undone state, requiring a supernatural 
and divine interposition to restore the ruin suffered. This 
is the point distinctly conceived by Christianity, and there- 
fore it is called a salvation. Plato saw distinctly enough 
the depravity of human nature, and his doctrine of virtue, 
we have seen, was that it can be formed in the soul, only 
by a divine communication. It is therefore only the more 
impressive, as a contrast, that, having these two elements 
of Christianity on hand, he nowhere conceives the virtue 
wrought to be asalvation. After all, the state of sin is not 
t> him a practically lost state, but the transition to virtue, 
slurred by indistinctness, is virtually regarded as a growth, 
or advance, on the footing of nature; not a rescue from 
nature by a power above nature; therefore not a salvation. 

3. The doctrine of this salvation makes it a salvation, 
by faith; in which we have another ruling idea of the 
scheme that coincides with its supernatural facts and char- 
acter. Christianity differs from all philosophies and ethie- 
al doctrines of men, in the fact that it rests all virtue in 
faith; exactly as it should, if it be a grace imported into 
nature from without, an advent in the world of one who 
is from above. Such a salvation lies not within the prem- 
ises of natural fact and reason; it is not therefore a mat 
ter of science, or of logical deduction. It makes its ad- 
dress, therefore, not to reason, but to faith. Reason may 


281) NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


be allowed to have a tribunitial veto against it, provided 
the doctrine is certainly proved to be contrary to reason, 
but it can not be receive] by reason. It is only received, 
when faith comes, laden with sin and fettered by its iron 
bondage, to rest herself, in holy trust, on the transcendent 
fact of such an appearing, and to find by experiment that 
it is, in sacred reality and power, what it assumes to be, 
It finds the new premise true, proves it to be true, intuits 


it, in and by the immediate experience of the mind. The 


new salvation is by faith, because it is a supernatural sal- 
vation; for whatever virtue the plan ministers must be 
in and by the receiver's faith, practically trusting soul and 
spirit to the fact of such a Saviour and salvation. 

There is much quarreling with the New Testament on 
this ground. It becomes an offense because it requires 
faith. Where is the merit of mere believing, that it should 
be made the necessary condition of salvation? In one 
view there is none, we answer, and it is not required be- 
cause there is any. There is no merit in trusting a phy- 
sician, but it may be a matter of some consequence that 
his medicines be taken; as they will not be, without some 
kind of faith in him. So it is a matter of consequence that 
the christian grace be accepted, as it certainly will not be, 
unless the soul is practically trusted to it, and the giver. 
If there is to be a healing, a new ingeneration of life and 
holy virtue, it can never be, save by the efficacy of a su- 
pernatural remedy. Believing in that remedy is the same 
thing as coming into its power; and, therefore, on this 
faith the gospel hangs salvation. It could not be other- 
wise. If Christianity, being supernatural, offered salvation 
on any other terms than faith, the offer would even be ab- 
surd, having no agreement with the grace offered. That 


a 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 54) 


it hangs salvation on this condition, indicates a thorough 
insight of its own nature, and the more ready the shallow 
wit of man is to find fault with such a condition, as hu 
miliating or insulting to reason, the more evidently it 1s 
not from man, but from a superior and superhuman source. 

Regarding faith, in this manner, as having its value, not 
iu its own merit, but in what it receives, we would not be 
understood to represent it as an optional matter, without 
any positive obligation. It is a duty binding on every 
moral being, to believe and practically receive every thing 
that is true; and this on the principle that mind, honestly 
used, will distinguish all important truth. Doubtless one 
may become so entangled by the ingenious sophistries of 
sin, or so darkened by its baleful shadow, that he can not 
in a moment find, or finding, can not embrace the truth. 
In such a case, the blame must rest upon his guilty past, 
and the mental distortion he has created, by his former 
abuse of truth, until such time as he can recover his sight. 
And this he may do rapidly, if only, trusting in God, he 
will take into practice, for medicine, every single truth he 
is able to find. All his unbeliefs and misbeliefs will be 
certainly cleared in this manner. And therefore Christ 
requires it of him, that they shall be; throwing his salva- 
tion even upon his behef of the truth. 

4, Justification by faith is another distinctive point of 
the christian gospel. And this includes two principal 
matters combined; that the transgressor, believing, has a 
righteousness generated in him, which is not built up un- 
der the law, by his own practice; and that something has 
been done to compensate the law, violated by his past of 
tenses, and save it in honor, when his sin is forgiven. 

As to the former, the righteousness ingenerated, the 


882 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


manner is sufficiently indizated, when it is called the 
righteousness that is of God by faith, unto and upon all 
them that believe. It is unto and upon such only as be- 
lieve; because, as we just now said, speaking of salvation, 
it is only by faith that the soul is so trusted to, and depos- 
ited in, the supernatural grace of God, as to be invested 
with his righteousness, or assimilated to it. Besides it 
will be observed that this is called justification, partly be- 
cause the natural laws of retributive justice, which are 
penally chastising the sinner, holding him fast in the 
meshes of inextricable disorder and woe, can be contro- 
verted, or turned aside, only by a power supernatural and 
divine. . 

As to the latter point concerned, the implied compensa- 
tion to law, in the supposed free justification, it is not that 
something is done to be a spectacle before unknown worlds, 
or something to square up a legal account of pains and 
penalties, according to some small scheme of book-keeping 
philosophy, but it is simply this; that, as there must be 
two stages of discipline to varry on the world—viz., letter 
and spirit, law and grace—the introduction of pardon, or 
the universal and free remission of sins, must be so pre- 
pared, as not to do away with the law stage that is prece- 
dent, but must let them both exist together, to act 
concurrently on the world. And this is done by the obe- 
dience of Christ, obedience unto death. Who can say or 
think that God yields up his law in the forgiveness 
of sins, when the Word incarnate, bowing to that law of 
love himself—the same that our human sin has broken— 
renders up his life to it, and goes to the awful passion 
of the cross, that he may fulfill its requirements. Mag. 
nified and made honorable, by such a contribution of re 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 383 


spect, no tree remission or removal of penalties running 
against us, can be felt to shake its authority. 

It is hardly necessary to suggest the fact, that Christian: 
ity is radically distinguished, in this matter of justifica- 
tion, from the philosophies and the known religions... They 
see nothing in sin, or its penal disorders that requires a 
distinctly supernatural remedy; or, when they are re- 
moved, any apparent infringement of law and justice. 
They only think to make men better by something done 
upon the natural footing; which, if they can do, they 
have no farther concern. They have no such conception 
of a twofold economy of God as makes it a matter of 
consequence to see that, when he forgives, the law is saved 
to the world and kept on foot, as an element of training 
and discipline. If they speak of pardon, it 1s no such 
pardon as partakes a judicial character. Or if they speak 
of expiation, offering up their children, it may be, to buy 
the release of their sin, it is the passions of their God they 
seek to arrest, and not his desecrated authority they will 
sanctify. ‘They have no care for law, and no suspicion 
that their God has any. They have no conception of any 
such solemn relations between their sin and the eternal. 
government of the world, as creates a difficulty in the way 
of releasing their punishment. No difficulty is appre- 
hended, save in the ill-nature of their God; and they ex- 
pect to appease him by giving him pains enough, and 
gory bodies enough of the innocent, to satisfy him. But 
the christian truth is deeper in its reasons, and has a more 
benign character. It comes into the world as a divine ad- 
vent, to fulfill a second stage in the moral economy of ho: 
liness. As the law begins with nature, so this finishes 
with supernatural grace. As one binds, the other liber- 


58£ NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


ates; as one kills, the other makes alive; and yet so tem: 
pered are they both, that they are kept in perpetual action 
together. Let the philosophers and human teachers show 
us that they have some comprehension of the great prob- 
lem of life, and of God’s relation to it, equally compre 
hensive in its breadth, and deep in its reasons. 

5. It is another of the grand distinctions of Christianity 
that it sets up a kingdom of God on earth. It is called 
“the kingdom of God” or “of heaven”, because the or- 
ganic force by which so many wills and finally all man- 
kind are to be gathered into unity, is not in nature, but 
comes down out of heaven, in the person of Christ the 
king. It is very natural that the different political organ- 
izations of the world should be employed figuratively, as 
terms of representation, in matters not political. Thus 
we have theoretic commonwealths, and ideal republics. 
Truth is conceived as an empire. In the natural sci- 
ences we have what are called three kingdoms, the ani- 
mal, and vegetable, and mineral. But here we have, 
what is not elsewhere conceived, a supernatural kingdom 
in souls, the kingdom of God; a real, living polity, organ- 
ized by areal king, and swayed and propagated by the 
powers of truth and love, centered in his divine person. 
Jesus coming into the world, as the incarnate Word of 
God, brings a new force with him, entering into souls as 
the advent of a new divine power. In him therefore 
begins, of course, a new organization, the kingdom of 
God in souls—righteousness, and peace, and joy in the 
Holy Ghost. This accordingly is the great thought of 
Christianity—the kingdom of God; the implanting of a 
divine rule in lost men, and the gathering in, at last, of 
all peop'e and kindreds of the earth, into a vast, 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE... 385 


universal order of peace and truth under Christ the 
anointed king. 

- The fact grows out of the incarnation, so that when 
Jesus is about to appear, the kingdom of heaven is at 
hand. No other religion, no priest or seer, no avatar of 
deity, has ever raised such a conception. It is the peculiar 
thought or fact of Christianity. And yet, daring as the 
proposition is, so extravagant that no mere man could 
make it without a charge of lunacy, Christ undertakes 1t— 
Christ, the Nazarene carpenter—and what is more, as- 
sumes the dominion and makes his kingdom goed. And 
| yet, if he could not make it good, his incarnation could not 
stand, as an accepted fact. So closely interwoven are these 
two, the incarnate appearing, and the kingdom of God. 

6. The Holy Spirit also is a christian conception, stand- 
ing in profound agreement with the supernatural fact of 
the gospel. As Christ, incarnate, is a supernatural em- 
bodiment, or manifestation localized in space, so the Holy 
Spirit is a supernatural indwelling force, by which Christ 
is perpetuated in the world, universalized in all localities, 
and brought nigh to every being, in every place. And 
that there may be no mistake regarding the supernatural 
character of his agency, he is represented as being inau- 
gurated by external signs, and by gifts of utterance and 
healing, that transcend all human power. He is not to 
be confounded, in this respect, with conceptions often ta- 
ken up by the eastern sages and philosophers, that are 
analogous in form, but really suppose, in their minds, no 
agency of God, save that. which is implied in his omnt- 
present dominion over nature. “God, they conceived, per- 
meates or passes through all things,”* and they called him 


—d — 


* Cud. IL, 498. 
33 


886 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


in this view, “the divine spirit.”* Thus Apuleius says, 
that “nothing is so excellent, or great in power, as to be 
content with its own nature alone, void of the divine 
aid or influence.” Philoponus, with our very point of 
need in his eye, calls what should be the Spirit, simply a 
Providence. ‘Though the soul be lapsed into a preter: 
natural or unnatural state, still it is yet not neglected by 
Providence, but has a constant care taken of it, in order to 
its recovery.”+ Seneca distinctly conceives a divine 
spirit, active in us, and yet this spirit dwindles into a min- 
ister only of natural retribution. ‘The sacred spirit 
dwells in us, observer of our evil things, guardian of 
our good, and he treats us as we treat him.”{ None of 
these conceptions really meet the case of a supernatural 
religion. ‘This demands a Spirit engaged to deliver and 
competent to deliver from the lapse of nature, by acting 
on the fallen subject, and separating him from the re- 
tributive action of natural causes; dwelling in him thus, 
holding him up, guiding him on, extricating his liberty, 
and witnessing in him, as a divine revelation to his con- 
sciousness, 

There is also a profound necessity for the Holy Spirit, 
thus conceived, in the miraculous advent of Christ itself, 
Christ and the Spirit are complementary forces, and, both 
together, constitute a complete whole; such a kind of 
whole as no man, or myth, or acciderit ever invented, 
There was an inherent necessity that whatever supernat- 
ural movement, for the regeneration of man, might be un- 
dertaken, should include, both a moral, and an efficient 
agency; one before the understanding, and the other back 
of it, in the secret springs of the disordered nature; a di- 


* De Mundo, 68. + Proem in Aristotle ae Anima. t Ep., 41. 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETR 887 


vine object clothed in beauty, and love, and justice, to be 
a mold into which the soul may be formed, the type of 
a divine life in which it may consentingly be crystallized; 
an efficient grace, working within the soul, preparing it to 
will and to do and rolling back the currents of retribu- 
tive causes in it, opening it to the power of its glorious 
exemplar and drawing it ever into that and a life pro- 
ceeding from it. Without the former before the mind, 
whatever is done within, by efficiency, would be only a work 
of repair, a something executed, of whose way or method 
we should know as little as we do of health restored by 
hidden causes. The change would be merely physical, 
not any change of character at all, more than when the 
secretions of the body are changed. Without the latter— 
the efficient working—the model set before us in the di- 
vine beauty of Christ and his death, would find us dulled 
in understanding, blurred in perception, and held fast in 
the penal bondage of our sins; approving the good before 
us only faintly, desiring it coldly, endeavoring after it, if 
at all, impotently, even as a bird might try to rise whose 
wings are cut. 

Such is the profound agreement of Christ and the Holy 
Spirit. One is naught without the other. Given then the 
fact of the incarnation, and of Christ’s human appearing, 
by whom was this remarkable counterpart or complement 
to his appearing invented? Who, in other words, con- 
trived the day of pentecost? Was ita man? was it sever- 
al men of only common faith? or was it done by the loose 
gossip of a wondering and credulous age? The history 
says that Christ himself gave the Spirit, by direct proinise; 
declaring that it was expedient now for him to retire from 
before the eyes, that the Spirit might come, and taking his 


888 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


exemplar into men’s bosoms, in every place, all over the 
world, shew it to them there. Who but Christ and 
he, the eternal Son of God, ever generated this concep- 
tion? | 

7. The doctrine of spiritual regeneration, propounded 
in the gospel, is another point, where it meets, at once, 
our human state and the fact of a supernatural economy. 
This truth of regeneration supposes a loss out of human 
nature, of the seed-principle of a good and holy life; 
such that the subject has really no good in his character, 
and never can by himself generate, or set himself in, the 
principle of good. He can do many good things, such as 
men call good, according to the standard of ethics or of 
human custom (which is the world’s law of virtue,) and 
may fitly enough be praised, for the comely parts that 
make up the figure of his life. But these comelinesses are 
a virtue of items, mere will-works that proceed from no 
seed-principle of good. Sometimes even the worldly: 
minded teachers of Christianity take up with this kind 
of virtue, and form their estimates of character, by in- 
specting the atoms collected in the life. Some things 
done, they say, are good, and some are bad—the good 
things ought to be increased, and the bad reduced. They 
see, of course, no radical defect back of the particulars 
noted, and therefore no need of a radical change in the 
life. It is the things done that make the character, and 
not the principle, or want of it, that gives character to the 
things. Their gospel is even more shallow than a pagan’s 
philosophy. According to Seneca, who penetrates the 
real ground-work of human character—‘ ali sins are in 
all men, but do not appear in each man. He that hath 
one sin, hath all. We say that all men are intemperate, 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 389 


avaricious, luxurious, malign—not that these sins appear 
in all, but because they may be, yea, are, in all, though 
latent."* Nothing is more rational; for, if nothing is 
done from any right principle, then nothing done is right, 
and there is no seed of right-doing in us. he doings 
may be kept up by our will, without any seed-principle, 
so attentively and punctiliously as even to become tastes; 
but tastes are not inspirations, and the only true virtue 
of man is that which he does from God, in the inspiration 
of a divine liberty. Separated from God, he is a monster, 
and not a proper man, however plausible the show he 
makes. And this is the effect of sin. It alienates the 
subject from the life of God. Under sin, he is no more 
conscious of God, as in his normal state he was and must 
be. He is therefore uncentralized by it, dead at the core. 
The seed-principle of eternal life and beauty and order is 
gone. He centers in himself, gravitates downward into, 
collapses in, himself; and he could as easily leap out of 
the maelstrom, as set himself in the true liberty and seed- 
principle of holiness. 

It is therefore declared, as the necessary condition of 
our salvation, that we must be born again, born not of 
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, 
but of God. And this great change is the beginning and 
spring of all true heavenly virtue, because it is the revela- 
tion of God in the soul. Now the soul is conscious of God 
again. Now it moves in the line of the divine movement, 
which is moving in the Spirit; which, again, is the inspi- 
ration of liberty. All this, of course, not without consent 
m the subject, probably not without some deep and vio- 
lent struggles on his part, to make way for the divine 


* Kp., 50. 
S52 


8390 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


revelation. He must offer up himself to the divine will 
and to all the approaches of the divine love; and this 
includes much-.-a removal of all obstructions, a renuncia- 
tion of self, a free commitment of all things to Christ, 
and a pliant, unequivocal, and humble faith in him. But 
none of these are, by themselves, regeneration. That is 
of God, and is, in fact, the soul’s assumption, or resump- 
tion, by God. To-say that it is a change of the soul’s 
love, is only another version of the same truth; for the 
love is changed by the entering in of God and his love, 
into the soul’s faith. For love is of God, and every one » 
that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. Old things 
are passed away, and all things are become new; because 
God is revealed within, changing, of course, the principle 
of all action, and the meaning of all experience. That 
this new revelation is supernatural, coinciding, in every 
thing said of it, with the grand central fact of the incarna- 
tion, need not be shown. Enough that it is the initiation 
of a sinner and alien into the kingdom of God—except a 
man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God. 
8. The christian doctrine of Providence coincides, also, 
with the fact of a supernatural work in the redemption of 
mankind. It assumes, without misgiving, the bold con- 
ception of a supernatural Providence, under which the 
world itself is ruled in the interest of Christianity; a con- 
ception that will be verified in the next or following chap- 
ter, and therefore need not be discussed here. Nothing 
more is necessary to our present purpose, than just to call 
attention to the remarkable fact that this myth, this mar: 
vel of superstition, this gossip of miracle, that we call 
Christianity, dares to claim the government of the world 
(as in real consistency it should,) in its interest, and, what 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 891 


is more, history, as we shall see, audits the claim, anc 
makes it good. 

9, We name, as another point of the christian doctrine, 
strangely and surprisingly coincident with the supernatu- 
ral idea of the plan, introduced by the incarnate appea* 
ing of Christ, the Trinity of God. I say, strangely and 
surprisingly coincident, because the last thing that would 
occur to any human being, in the exercise of his natural 
wisdom, would be the introduction of a new, or modified 
conception of God, to accommodate the new fact of a 
gospel. And yet, exactly this is what we discover in the 
matter of that gospel; and, what is more, having the fact 
before us, we can easily enough distinguish a practical 
reason for it, in the requisite instrumental use, or handling 
of that gospel; or, what is no wise different, in the prac- 
tical adjustment of our relations to God, under the two- 
fold conditions of nature and grace, in which he is now 
set before us. 

We can not here go into the learning of this great 
question. Suffice it to say, that the Old Testament scrip- 
tures contain the rudiments cf a trinity, and that the Pla- 
tonic, Alexandrian, and Christian trinities are either sug- 
gested by, or developed from these rudiments. That the 
Old Testament scriptures are prior in date, even by hund- 
reds of years, to the writings of Plato, is not to be denied. 
The east was full of traditions from these scriptures, and 
le himself, a traveler in those parts, professed that he de- 
rived many things from the traditions of the “ Barbarians.” 
It can not therefore be charged that the Christian trinity, 
as given by Christ, in the baptismal formula, was origin- 
ally a product of natural reason, and was transferred 
from Plato’s theosophy. No trinity was ever suggested 


2909 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


by mere thought, or generated by mere natural reason. 
Reason takes the road of unity, and the conception of a 
triad comes out, if at all, from the process of a supernat- 
ural revelation. Thus came the Christian trinity, as a 
fact historically developed; first in the Almighty Creator 
and Father, the Jehovah-angel or Word of the Lord, and 
the Holy Spirit, of the Ola Testament; then in the 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the New. It is a concep- 
tion generated by supernatural transactions, and is needed 
to accommodate the uses of a supernatural salvation. 
Thus, if there were but one economy, or ministration 
of God, known to us, viz, that of nature, we should 
never need, and, in fact, should never have, any concep- 
tion of the divine being, save that which is named by the 
terms God, the Almighty, the Creator, and others, con- 
formed to the notion of the divine unity. But, having 
fallen into a state of retributive disorder, from which we 
can be delivered only by a supernatural salvation, we are 
obliged to adjust ourselves toward God as filling two 
economies, and that requires a new machinery of thought. 
If now we have only the single term God, we must speak 
of God as dealing with God, or of the grace-force of God, as 
delivering from the nature-force of God. If the work 
includes an incarnation, as we suppose it must, then it 
must be: God sending God into the world; and, if it 
includes a renovating, new-revealing ageucy within, then 
we can only go to God to give us God, and ask of God to 
roll back the retributive causations of God, that are fast- 
ening their penal bondage on us. All which, we may 
see, is a method too clumsy and confused to serve, at all 
the practical uses of the salvation provided. There is, in 
short, po intellectual machinery, in a close theoretic mon- 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 893 


otheism, for any such thing as a work of grace, or super- 
natural redemption. In the Christian trinity, this want is 
supplied. First, we have the Father, setting God before 
us as the author and ground of all natural things and 
causes. ‘Then we have the Son and the Spirit, which 
represent what God may do, acting on the lines of causes 
In nature; one as coming into nature from without, to be - 
incarnate in it, the other as working internally in the 
power of the Son, to dispense to the soul what he ad- 
dressed outwardly to human thought, and configure the soul 
to him, as an exemplar embraced by its faith. Then, 
putting our trust in the Son, as coming down from God, 
offering himself before God, going up to Him, interceding 
before Tim, reigning with Him, by Hsm accepted, honored, 
glorified; invoking also God and Christ to send down 
the Spirit, and let him be the power of a new indwelling 
life, breathing health into our diseases, and rolling back the 
penal currents of justice to free us of our sin, we are able to 
act ourselves before the new salvation, so as to receive the 
full force of it. Having these instruments of thought and 
feeling and faith toward God, and suffering no foolish 
quibbles of speculative logic to plague us, asking never 
how many Gods there are? nor how it is possible for one 
to send another, act before another, reconcile us to an- 
other? but, assured that God is one eternally, however 
multiform our conceptions of his working, how lively 
and full and blessed is the converse we get, through these 
living personations, so pliant to our use as finite men, so 
gloriously accommodated to the twofold economy of our 
salvation as sinners! Is this now a conception gotten up 
by man, upon his natural ievel? Is there any philosophic 
theosophic, or mythologie mark upon it? 


394 NO OTHER SUPERNATURAL RELIGION 


We have thus brought into review as many as nine 
of the principal facts and prominent articles of Chris- 
tianity, and find them crystallizing into a perfectly har- 
monious and orderly system, round the one central fact 
of a supernatural religion, initiated in the incarnate ap- 

earing of Christ. His work is called a gospel on this 
account, precisely as it should be, and yet by no human 
suggestion would bé. It is also called a salvation, differ- 
ing from all theosophies and mythologies, in the fact that 
it is a supernatural restorative force, and, in that view, the 
only real salvation ever known. It brings the salvation 
also to faith and hangs it on faith, as by the conditions of 
the case it must, and as no other known scheme of virtue 
does. It justifies also by faith, communicating, in tlus 
manner, the righteousness of God and preparing acquittal 
in a way that keeps the law in full force, as the nature- 
side and necessary element of human training. A king- 
dom of God,.or of heaven, is erected by it on earth; in 
which we see, by the name itself, that the reigning force 
of the new kingdom is not of nature, but from without 
and above the world. The Holy Spirit is inaugurated as 
a conception of the divine working, different from that 
which is included in the laws of nature, and delivering 
from the retributive action of those laws. This deliver- 
ance, connected with a renovated principle of life in the soul, 
it calls regeneration, conceiving, 1n a way peculiar to itself, 
that, without the change thus denominated, as a second 
birth, or newly regenerated life, there is and can be no seed- 
principle of heavenly virtue. Here too is proposed, for the 
first time in the world, a properly supernatural Providence ; 
that is, a Providence which governs the world, in the in 
terest of salvation, or regenerated holiness. Accordantly 


Te ee ———— = 


—————e— eS ee _ 


INTELLECTUALLY COMPLETE. 895 


also with such a conception of God, as presiding over a 
double administration of law and grace, nature and the 
supernatural, the divine unity is reproduced as trinity ; in 
which, whatever may be thought of other trinities, Chris- 
tianity holds, at least, the honorable distinction of being 
the only doctrine that conceives a trinity, in and through, 
and practically operative with, a double economy of 
divine government. 

Is there not something remarkable in this general con: 
sent of the christian names, facts, ideas, and doctrines? 
and the more remarkable that it appears in matters where 
we should least look for it, if left to ourselves and the 
natural processes of our thoughts? And still the list 
might be indefinitely extended. Thus preaching is to be 
the means of propagation for this gospel, and what but a 
supernatural gift to the world could ever be heralded or 
preached? Prophesying in the Spirit is a supernatural ut- 
terance. ‘T’he ministry are conceived to be set apart by 
the Holy Spirit, which is true of no other class of teachers, 
on the footing of reason, or of natural science. Spiritual 
gifts belong to a plan transcending nature. The sacraments 
are consecrated vehicles of grace and power. Visions 
and revelations are from above. The resurrection of the 
dead is not of nature. The history of the original propa- 
gation of Christianity, taken as a whole, is in fact a 
miraculous process, and nothing less. In short the whole 
fabric of the christian institution—thought, name, office, 
fact, and doctrine—centers, we discover, in the one grand 
idea of a supernatural movement on the world. There is 
nothing eccentric, that will not fall imto the general aim 
of the plan, and chime with it; no fantastic matter that is 
unreducible, as we should expect, if human wisdom only 


(396 THIS COMPLETED SCHEME 


had undertaken the devising and the adjustment of she 
parts. As Napoleon noticed, with an impression of won- 
der, “one thing follows another like the ranks of a celes- 
tial army.” He knew what an army was, and the order 
of a well-set discipline, but he finds a higher, even 
celestial order, which his phalanx is a thing too loose to 
represent, in the gloriously compacted truths of a heaven 
born, supernatural faith. 

Even Mr. Hennel admits a correspondent impression of 
the compact unity, and the admirable working order of 
the christian plan ; admitting, strangely enough, that it ex- 
cels all other fruits of human learning and philosophy in 
this respect, and yet conceiving that, with all its high pre- 
tensions of a supernatural origin, and the undeniably 
supernatural guise in which it stands, it is itself a strictly 
human product! He says, “Christianity has presented 
to the world a system of moral excellence. It has 
led forth the principles of humanity and benevolence 
from the recesses of the schools and groves, and com- 
pelled them to take an active part in the affairs of life. 
It has consolidated the moral and religious sentiments inte 
a more definite, influential form than had before existed, 
and thereby constituted an engine that has worked power- 
fully toward humanizing and civilizing the world.”* 
Moral and religious sentiments! as if it were only a com- 
pact of these and such like human qualities, when it is 
talking all the while of the incarnation, of faith, of justi- 
fication, of the better covenant, of regeneration, of the resur- 
rection of the dead, and commanding its apostles to preach 
the trinity of God! Are these staple matters of Christianity 
our “moral and religious sentiments?” “Consolidated” 


—_—_—— 


eee 


_ * Inquiry, p. 48. 


sone Sel i ee ieee 


CAN NOT BE OF MAN. 897 


also they are “into a more definite and influential form !* 
Ts it in such lofty and transcendent spiritualities as these 
which are named, that our mere human notions are wont 
to get consolidated? And why could not the philogo- 
phers, such men as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and 
Seneca, consolidate such human notions as well, or to as 
good effect, as the rude fishermen of Galilee? And yet 
what is there of solidity, in giving to these mere natural 
things or sentiments, a form so fantastical and flighty, 
and calling them by names to which no human thought 
can reach? Doubtless christianity is “more influen- 
tial,” but it is so, because it is so truly unsolid, so spir- 
itual, and so visibly superior to the world, and to all those 
dull imbecilities sometimes called religious sentiments. 
God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself—that 
is influential, that is power! 

And now the question is, whence comes this super- 
natural, world-transcending institute, erected among us, 
in so many tokens of a perfect intelligence? Whence 
this more than logical, this organic unity in things so re- 
mote, and to mere human thought. undiscoverable? for if 
it be possible that human thought should stumble on a 
fiction so magnificent, it certainly could not frame it into 
order, and offer it as a truth of salvation. 

In adjusting our answer to this question, it is important, 
first of all, to observe that the christian truth has obviously 
nothing of the form of a scheme thought out by the 
natural understanding. It is not metaphysical or deduct- 
ive. It proposes itself to faith, under laws of expres- 
sion, and is plainly seen to be no product of mental analy- 
sis, or coustructive logic. It has the form not of some. 
thing venerated by, put of something offered tw, the woild. - 

34 


898 THIS COMPLETED SCHEME 


It comes down into history, as it represents, from a point 
above history; standing out in symbols of fact and ex- 
pression, that are to report and verify themselves. It is, 
in form, a something to be believed, not a something rea 
soned—incarnation, love, miracle, a calling of God after 
men, a communication of the divine nature. Admitting, 
as we safely enough may, for the present, that criticism 
discovers tokens of human activity and frailty in the 
record, still the operative system stands forth in its own 
simple confidence, in its own heavenly form, as a gospel 
to the world, and as such it reveals the solid unity, the 
glorious depth of harmony and _self-understanding, we 
have discovered in its doctrine. It speaks as if it never 
had 1 thought of system, and yet reveals areach of system 
widor than all human philosophy. 

Fut this will be denied, and still it will be maintained 
that this unconscious, inartificial fabric 1s a work of art. 
That, if we know any thing of what is in man, is impos- 
sible. If the scheme were down upon the footing of na- 
ture, as on the face it declares it is not, then it might not 
be difficult to admit that human skill, or even the silent 
process of human history, as in the case of the English 
common law, should shape it into a system of apparent 
order and scientific unity. But being a scheme supernat- 
ural, not even the first facts or premises were included 
in our knowledge, as derived from our natural expe- 
rience, and required therefore to be invented by us; and to 
suppose that our human faculties, breaking over the con; 
fines in this manner of all knowledge, could there build 
up, in the cloud-land of unknown, merely imagined fact, a 
sober, thoroughly coherent scheme of truth and renova- 
ting life, adjusting the infinite to the finite, law to merey, 


CAN NOT IE OF MAN. 899 


discord and death to liberty and salvation, and setting all 
its grand array of facts, names, doctrines, and yiowers ina 
frame of solid and compact unity—such a supposition is 
too extravagant to be rationally entertained. It is sup- 
posing that we are able to build, in the realm of fiction it- 
self, a vaster and more solid economy of intellectual and 
practical truth, than has ever yet been built on the basis 
of experience. 

Three suppositions may be raised in regard to the mat: 
ter in question; viz., that the work is all of man; that it 
is partly of man; and that it is all of God. The first of 
these we have discussed already; for, if such a work 
could not be invented, much less could it be accomplished 
by the hap-hazard process of myth and wild tradition. 
The second, which supposes, some central point of a su- 
pernatural plan being given—the fact, for example, of the 
incarnation—that this fact was wrought up by the human 
understanding, through a course of active development, 
into the complete scheme and perfect unity we have de- 
scribed, need not be particularly discussed, because it 
allows the fact of a supernatural root and beginning, 
which is the principal matter in question. 

The third supposition is the only one that is rationally 
tenable; viz., that this grand out-birth of a new divine 
economy, called the gospel, is, in fact, supernatural, and 
stands in the compact order of a complete intellectual 
unity, because it was given by a comprehending mind 
equal to the reach of the plan. Not that every thing 
written, or advanced in the canonical books of the New 
Testament, is historic fact, or infallible truth—our present 
supposition does not reach so far as that, but leaves a 
space to be filled up by other kinds of argument—it 


400 THIS COMPLETED SCHEME 


~ 


simply supposes that all such prominent ideas, tokens 


facis, and doctrines as we have named—-that is, every’ 


thing which goes to shape the new economy, as being 
integral to it—is brought into ki.owledge and published 
to the world supernaturally. And the proof is that al- 
ready given; viz., that the consent of so many parts and 
tokens in one central fact and design, can not otherwise 
be accounted for,» and is otherwise truly impossible, 
The human understanding may frame a theory out of 
data, or phenomena, supplied by experience; it may 
scheme out a system or hypothesis, regarding matters 
known, that is coherent, and stands in the complete unity 
of reason; but it is a very different thing to make up a 
supernatural kosmos of fact, doctrine, idea, relatively 
consistent, and converging, all, on the common point of a 
spiritual renovation of souls. That, we may affirm with 
entire confidence, is not within the compass of any human 
power. 

Of this, too, we have abundant evidence, besides that 
which rests in any mere judgment of human capacity. 
The whole religious and mythologic history of the world 
is such evidence. In the first place, every pagan religion, 
every mythology, is in form a supernatural machinery; a 
fact which Mr. Parker and others who endeavor to reduce 
Christianity to a common footing with such mythologies, 
and so to a mere product of nature, have strangely over- 
looked. In the next place, what one of these pagan sua- 
pernaturalisms has ever proposed the problem of salva- 
tion, or the deliverance of man from sin and the restora- 
tion of his divine consciousness ?—the only real problem, 
manifestly, that requires to be supernaturally solved. 
Again, what one of these mythologies proposes to erect 


ee 


CAN NOT BE OF MAN. 401 


the kingdom of God among men, or has any consistent 
and concentrated action bearing on that one result, or 
indeed on any other? What one of them, we may ask, 
even proposes a pure morality? So plainly impossible is 
it for man, or human history, to develop any intelligent 
and rationally harmonious scheme of supernaturalism. 

And yet we have more convincing proofs even than 
these. See what figure is made by Mormonism, Moham- 
medanism, and the Romish Church, all of which begin 
with supernatural conceptions, or data, furnished by 
Christianity. If we will ascertain what it is in man to do, 
in the way of composing supernatural verities, sce what 
additions or amendments these have furnished. The new 
faith of Mormon pretends to be christian still, only it is a 
more complete and finished form of the christian truth, 
But the ungodly and profane mummeries it has added, in 
the new revelations of the book, the new priesthood, and 
the new sainthood, all of which are boasted and accepted 
as improvements, it is very plain are only mockeries of 
all the practical aims of the gospel, and of the virtues it 
came to restore. Mohammedanism, borrowing from the 
Christian scriptures, proposes for its aim, to perfect in men 
a heavenly virtue. But the doctrine of fatalism it estab- 
lishes, forbids, at the outset, every struggle after such 
heavenly virtue, and the sensual paradise it promises, 
generates, as far as it goes, a habit opposite to every thing 
in the nature of that virtue. 

But these, it will be said, are not, in any proper sense, 
developments of the Christian supernaturalism, at which 
they begin; but tricks of knavery, or ravings of fanati- 
cism. Pass then to the Romish Church, and see what the 
venerable, slow-moving wisdom of ages can do. Here 

34* 


402 THIS COMPLETED SCHEMRB 


we meet the councils, age after age, in their high delib 
erations. All the learning of the world, for many hund- 
reds of years, is here concentrated. Heretical additions 
are here carefully scented, and promptly burnt out by the 
fires of purification. All determinations pass by debate, 
and sometimes by the debates of ages. The history 1s a 
process slow and laborious, like that which generates the 
common or the civil law; and the result is even called a 
development of Christianity. What then do we find? 
Is the glorious order. and regenerative unity of the gospel, 
as a power of salvation, preserved and augmented, or is 
it overlaid and stifled, by a mass of antichristian inven- 
tions and corrupt traditions, that have really no agree- 
ment with it? And yet they are all introduced to give 
it greater effect. The exorcisins were to expel devils; but 
- the solemn trifling of the ceremony only turned the disci: 
ple away from faith, to look after powers of magic. The 
amulets were to be pledges, on the person, of God’s keep- 
ing and defenso, against devils and all disasters; but these 
were accepted as charms also of magic. The sacrament 
itself of Christ’s body and blood, ordained to be the ve- 
hicle and sign of a co-operative grace to the recipient, 
must needs be farther intensified in its power, and, to this 
end, was transmuted into the very substance of Christ, by 
a perpetual miracle; which miracle, again, was taken as 
another feat of priestly magic, and watched as a pious’ 
incantation by the receiver. Celibacy and monastic re- 
tirement were to beget a higher and more superlative 
virtue; turning out, instead, to be only the scandal and 
disgust of the world. Pictures were added, to assist the 
mind in conceiving things high and remote; operating, 
instead, as a stricture pon it, and chaining it down to a 


CAN NOT BE OF MAN. 4.3 


new antichristian idolatry. Ascetic practices were added, 
to chasten the soul and refine its spiritual fires; only 
kindling, instead, the fires of a new fanaticism. The way 
to Christ would be more easy, it was conceived, if his 
mother could be invoked to present the cause of the sup 
plant; and lo! Christianity becomes no more a gospel of 
life, but a fantastic scheme of Mariolatry. A vicar of 
Christ was wanted, many thought, to represent him on 
earth, and be a visible mark for their faith; but the vicar 
displaced the principal, becoming a mark, instead, of su- 
perstitious homage, and a receiver of deific honors. 

And thus we have a proof irresistible of what man 
can do, in the way of thinking out, or dressing up, a 
scheme of supernatural truth. Four or five common 
persons, without learning or culture, assisted by one 
other distinguished by higher advantages, have pre- 
sented, we have seen, such a scheme. All the parts they 
have set in harmony with each other, and made them 
crystallize into the perfect unity of the plan. But here 
we find all the great minds of the church, the learned, the 
wise, the prudent, and even the good, slowly elaborating 
their additions, or, as some will say, tbeir developments, 
of the doctrine handed down to them, and producing just 
that which has no agreement whatever with its genuine 
import and the real movement it proposes—joining, as 
the classic poet says, a “horse’s neck to a man’s head,” 
and expanding the simple, life-giving truth, into such the- 
atrical pomps and scholastic wisdoms, that a cap and bells 
would scarcely be a less appropriate honor. 

What, then, have we to do, after such a reference as 
this, but to gather up all these prominent facts, ideas, 
names, and doctrines, which we have seen coalesce so per- 


404 THE SCHEME NOT OF MAN. 


fectly in the central fact of a supernatural grace for 
the world, composing, when taken together, the total 
frame-work and complete virtuality of the gospel, and 
say that, in this secret and every where present water- 
mark, we read the signature of God? None but He 
could have organized this heavenly kosmos that we call 
the gospel. 


ie v 
“sy 


CHAPTER X{Il. 


THE WORLD IS JOVERNED SUPERNATURALLY IN THE 
INTEREST OF CHRISTIANITY. 


CHRISTIANITY, as planted by Christ, is a divine institute 
in the world, the particular design of which is to act re- 
medially, as against the mischiefs introduced by sin, and 
propagated by the retributive causes of nature. ‘The Holy 
Spirit also is, by the supposition, a divine force or deific 
agency inaugurated in the world, to carry on, through all 
the coming ages, this same new-creating work. Now, as 
there is but one divine being or God, who is entered thus 
into so great a work, with tokens of feeling so impressive- 
ly indicated, it follows by a very short inference, if in- 
deed by any inference at all, that the one God of the 
world, governing it always accordantly with Himself, must 
govern it in the interest of Christianity. Christianity, 
plainly, is either nothing to Him, or else it is more than 
any secondary thing; the hinge of his counsel, the mis- 
sion of his love, the grand, all-inclusive, and eternal aim 
of his purposes. And if this be true, he will not govern 
the world in a way that forgets or overlooks Christianity, 
but will govern it rather for Christianity’s sake; which, 
again, is the same as to say that he will govern it by a su- 
pernatural regimen, even as Christianity itself 1s a super- 
natural institution. 

Exactly this, too, is the assumption of Christ himself, 
He openly claims the government of the world, as being 
in his interest, or at the disposal of his cause and king- 
dom; saying-—“‘all power is given untc me in heaven and 


406 ‘HE TWO KINDS 


in earth.” He 1s also declared by his apostle to have “as 
cended on high, leading captivity captive,” that he might 
be a dispenser of divine gifts in this manner; “for God 
hath set him at his own right hand, in the heavenly places, 
far above all principality and power, and hath put all 
things under his feet, that he might be head over all things 
to the Church.” He also publishes, himself, a doctrine of 
prayer that supposes the same thing; or that, if any one 
will ask in his name, or as abiding in him and doing his 
will, he shall have his petition—eguidance, light, deliver- 
ance, healing of the sick, support against enemies, 
power to work, patience to suffer—every thing that sup- 
poses the government to be enlisted, as a supernatural 
Providence, in the furtherance of his christian welfare, 

Indeed we shall not sufficiently understand the christian 
ideas of Providence, till we conceive it to be a twofold 
scheme of order and divine dispensation. Nature, in the 
first place, is a kind of Providence, being so adjusted as ta 
meet all the future uses it can, as nature, meet. But it 
requires little insight, to perceive that it can not meet those 
uses that suppose a need of deliverance from nature. 
Manifestly nature can not rescue from the disorders, pro- 
duced by a retributive action of her own causes. And if 
ali God’s action were included in the operations of nature, 
nothing plainly could ever be done for man, as regards the 
wants of his sin, the cries of his repentance, or the strug- 
gles of his faith. Nature can throw him, and trarnple 
him, by her retributive causes, but she has no help to give 
him in rising, or rolling back her causes. 

On this subject of Providence, there is much of unreg: 
ulated thought and crude speculation. Thus it isa greatly 
debated question, whether there is a special, or only a gen- 


oe 


OF PROVIDENCE. AN} 


eral Providence? For it is conceived, by a certs.in class, 
thet God has a special meaning or design, in some few 
things of their experience, and not in others. This plain- 
ly is a faith of credulity, and one that accommodates God 
to the measures of human ignorance. Another class, who 
assume to be more philosophic, holding a general, and dv- 
nying a special Providence, only substitute an absurdity 
for a superstition; for what is a general Providence, that 
comprehends no special Providence, but a generality made 
up of no particulars, that is, made out of nothing? The 
only intelligent conception is, that every event is special, 
one as truly as another; for nothing comes to passin God’s 
world without some particular meaning or design. And 
so the general Providence is perfect, because the special is 
szomplete. 

And yet even this is no sufficient conception of Provi- 
dence. There is yet, after all, a real truth associated with 
the specialty view just stated, and covered, in part, by the 
scanty garb in which it is dressed; viz., that God is more 
warmly reciprocal with us and the struggles of our faith, in 
some things than in others—more reciprocal, that is, and 
closer to our want, and warmer to our feeling, in his su- 
pernatural Providence, than he is in his natural. 

The truth will be set in a more definite light, if we con- 
ceive, first of all, that nature is a kind of constant quan- 
tity and fixed term between us and God. It needed to be 
80, for many reasons. We could not even keep our fect if 
the ground had no stable quality. We could do nothing 
in the way of indastry, attain to no exercise of power; 
there would be no law, no science, nothing to meet our in- 
telligence; we could not act responsibly toward each other 
without some constant, calculable, or known medium 


408 PROVIDENCE NATURAL 


between us. We could apprehend no retributive force in 
nature, waiting by the laws of obligation, to be their sane- 
tion. Even God himself would be a vague and desultory 
phantom, if he were not represented to us by the fixed 
laws and the orderly enduring processes of nature. With- 
out these, even the light and shade of his supernatural 
manifestation would be insignificant—just as the living 
play of a countenance would signify nothing, if it had no 
lines of repose at which the play begins, and into which it 
returns. 

But, while such is nature, it is yet, as we have seen, sub- 
mitted, by its very laws, both to our supernatural action, 
and to that of God. As we act our liberty in it and upon 
it, never suspending or defrauding, even for a moment, 
any one of its laws, so it would be singular, if He could 
not do the same, and that upon a scale correspondent with 
the magnificence of his attributes. So, in millions of 
ways, at every minute, the courses of things may be 
touched by his will, and turned about, as the holy Poet 
says of the cloud, “‘to do whatsoever he commandeth 
upon the face of the earth.” _By means of the constant 
element between us and God—limbered, though constant, 
to our common action—we are set in terms of reciprocity 
as living persons or powers, and are found acting, as to- 
ward each other, in a perpetual dialogue of parts. Taken 
thus, in the whole comprehension of its import, our world 
is nothing but a vast, special, supernatural, reciprocal 
Providence, in which our God is reigning as an ever-pres- 
ent, ever-mindful counselor and guide and friend, a Re- 
deemer of our sin, a hearer of our prayers. It is not that 
he, long time ago, put causes at work to meet our wants, 
and answer our prayers, but that he worketh hitherto. 


—_e ee ee ee 


AND SUPERNATURAL | 409 


He is no dead majesty, but a living; and, if we want a 
special Providence, he is special enough to give us his re- 
cognition. He will even teach us how to pray, correcting 
our petitions to make them meet his counsel, and giving 
us desires, leveled to the exact aim of his purposes; even 
as the eagle teaches her young how to set their wings, and 
rest them on the air in flight. Not that he means, when 
speaking of things “agreeable to his will,” that we are 
inerely to come, guessing at things already fixed, and try- 
ing to suit our petition to the motion of the wheel as it 
rolls, shding it carefully in, at the right place, but that he 
will have us pray as in power; for it is agreeable to his 
will that we have power with God, and prevail—power to 
come and lay our hand on his, as his is laid on the world’s 
causes, and, by the suit of our want, emboldened by the 
acquaintanceship of our faith, to move that hand. And 
to just this end, as Christ himself teaches, all things in 
heaven and earth are submitted pliantly to him, so that, 
without shock or miracle, he can, if he will, turn them to 
his friendly and gracious purposes. The world and its 
affairs are so to become coefficients only of his gospel. 

Such is the conception Christianity holds of Providence, 
or the providential government of the world—it is super: 
natural, it is christly, and is to be relied upon ever, as a 
power operating for Christianity in the earth. Is the con- 
ception true, is it borne out by sufficient proofs? This, I 
shall now undertake to show. 

Let us note, in passing, however, as a fact introductory, 
that just such a government, as respects the mode, would 
be wanted and really required, apart from any fall of sm; 
or work of deliverance from it. or, if there be only na- 


ture, with her constant quantities and endlessly propagia- 
35 E 


410 APART FROM SIN, WR WANT 


ted causes, if there be no divine supernatural ageney in 
the world, then there is no conceivable footing of society, 
or social relationship with God left us. Nature, in such a 
scheme, is only a machine, and that machine is all that we 
have contact with. And if we should maintain our up- 
rightness, holding on in ways of unfaltering obedience, 
we shall none the less want to know God, and have our 
society with him. But we get no terms of society in a 
machine, we can not seek unto a wall. Acting supernat- 
urally ourselves, we need also to be supernaturally met 
and acted on. Without this, we have no terms of reci- 
procity with God more than with a volcano, or a tide of 
thesea. Society between us there is none. Society is rig- 
idly definable, as being a supernatural commerce vetween 
parties acting supernaturally. As between us and God, it 
is a doing and receiving; if we do not sin, a righteousness 
looking up to God in confidence, and a smile of approval 


looking down to commend and bless. But if there be no’ 


such thing as a divine supernatural agency, then is no such 
fonting of society conceivable. We exist as a solitary 
party. Nature is our cage, and the nearest approach we get 
to a recognition, is to find that we are shut upinit. Is itso? 
Do any of us think it is so? . Did we really believe it, what 
could our existence be but a conscious defeat and mock- 
ery, a longing that 1s objectless, a breathing without air? 
But our state is not a state of sinless obedience. We 
have set the retributive causes of nature against us, and 
Christianity undertakes to be our deliverer. And the 
claim now is, that the government of the world is super- 
naturally administered, so as to work with it. We al- 
lege, then, in evidence 


I, That facts do not take place here, in human society, 


A GOVERNMENT NOT MECHANICAL, 411 


government, and the church, as they should, if events 
were left to the mere causalities of nature, and were no 
way controllable by a supernatural ministration of divine 
government, or by some genuinely Christian providence, 
in the management of human affairs. 

The fact of sin is palpable, and is shown by evidences 
not to be questioned. What shock of disorder it must 
have given, or has in fact given, to the mundane kosmos, 
in all its parts, we have also shown. Taking now the 
supposition that there is nothing else but nature, and 
nature a scheme of universal cause and effect, that is, a 
machine, propagating its activities by its own organic 
laws, we ought to see no improvement, no advance, but a 
regular running down rather from bad to worse, and a 
final disappearance of all vestiges of order. Society and 
human capacity ought to sink away, universally, toward 
barbarism, and nature itself to grow weaker, more sterile, 
deeper in deformity and confusion. So it ought to be— 
speculatively viewed, or according to conditions of scjen- 
tific order and law, nothing else could be. And yet we 
are just now taken with such confidence of progress in 
our human history, as to imagine that progress is even a 
prime law of natural development itself In which we 
are doubtless right as regards the general fact of progress, 
(it is no fact as regards the savage races,) but are only the 
more strangely blind to the higher fact, which that prog: 
ress indicates; viz., the regenerative action of supernatu- 
ral forces, that, in spite of the downward tendency of 
mere nature under sin, are creating always a new heavens 
and earth, out of the ruins of the former beauty, and 
making even the losing experiences of evil, conditions of 
spiritual and social progress. Plainly no such progress 


412 THINGS DO NOT TAKE PLACE 


ever ought to be, or ever would be made, apart from the 
supernatural vauses which are its spring. | 

But there is a more deliberate way of testing this point, 
und a method of inquest that reaches farther. We turn 
ourselves to the courses and the grand events of human 
history, all that we include in the providential history of 
the world—the wars, diplomacies, emigrations, revolutions, 
persecutions, discoveries, and scientific developments of 
the world—and we are immediately met by the appearance 
of some wonderful consent or understanding, between 
Christianity and the providential courses of things. 
Christianity is, in form, the supernatural kingdom and 
working of God in the earth. It begins with a supernat 
ural advent of divinity, and closes with a supernaturai 
exit of divinity; and the divine visitant, thus entered 
into the world and going out from it, is himself a divine 
miracle in his own person; his works are miracles, and 
his doctrine quite as truly, and the whole transaction, 
taken as a movement on the world, or in it, that is not of 
it, supposes in fact a new and superior kind of adminis- 
tration, instituted by God Himself. Accordingly, if it be 
true that God is in such a work, having all the highest 
and last ends of existence rested in it, he ought to govern 
the world, as we have already said, for it, and so as to 
forward this as the main interest included in it. 

Now whatever may be true, as respects the positive and 
direct evidence of such a fact, this, at least, is a matter 
that will strike any one as being truly remarkable, and, 
moreover, as being quite unaccountable, except on the 
ground of its truth, that Christianity has never been ex- 
terminated, but still lives, and even holds a reigning 
power at the head of all learning, art, commerce, society, 


AS THEY OUGHT UNDER MERE NATURE. 4138 


polity, and political dominion in the earth. Pythagoras, 
Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, Seneca, all these great 
founders and law-givers in the world of philosophy are 
gone; the Academy and the Porch and all the schools 
that were gathered by the wisdom and the mighty and 
beautiful thought of these first minds of the world, are 
scattered; but Jesus, the unlettered rustic, lives, and his 
simple at distinguished by no literary pretensions, 
and recorded only in the simplest and most fragmentary 
way, by the unlettered men that caught them, live also. 
Studied in deepest reverence, and expounded by all the 
richest, nicest learning of the world, and fed on by the 
praying souls of the faithful in all walks and conditions 
of life, they are continually gathering new followers, and 
composing a larger school, .o which no inclosures of 
Academy or Porch, nothing but kingdoms and conti 
nents, can think to give their name. Why now is it, 
that time and the world’s government conspire so power- 
fully with Jesus, and not with such a great and deeply 
cultured soul as Plato? Why with Christianity, and not 
with any proudest school of human opinion? - All the 
mere human teachers are much closer to nature certainly 
than Jesus was, and if the world’s governinent is wholly 
natural, or in the interest of nature, it would seem to be 
a very plain inference that what belongs ‘to nature will be 
most easily perpetuated. _Why should a government, in 
the interest of nature, concur to enthrone and crown what 
is really supernatural ? 

Besides, nature, as we have seen, is a power acting 
retributively, in a process of self-chastisement and deteri- 
oration naturally endless, and upon this falling flood, or 


_ into it, Christianity settles, to grapple with its mad causa- 
35* 


414 THINGS DO NOT TAKE PLAUE 


tions, and roll them back, and hush their elemental war, 
by its words of peace; how then is it, that a new, super 
natural dispensation, which arrays itself, at all points, 
against nature and its penal disorders, erects upon the 
unsteady waters of so fickle and wild a sea, the only 
institution that for the last eighteen hundred years has 
been able to challenge the honors of permanence? If 
there be no power but nature, no government supericr tc 
the interest of nature, it certainly ought not to be so. On 
the contrary, whatever pretends to be supernatural, ought 
to die soonest, and show the greatest frailty—even as the 
pouring waters of Niagara may well enough keep on over 
the rapids, down the fatal leap, and no cessation make, 
even for millions of years; whereas, the slender, light- 
trimmed vessel, that sets her sails for the ascent of those 
same rapids, ought not to stem them by one inch, and 
least of all, to become an institution in them, stiffly and 
steadily breasting the current for ages. And yet, if 
there were some Higher Providence governing those falls 
in the interest of the vessel, and not, as nature would, the 
vessel in the interest of the falls, then plainly it would no 
longer be absurd, for that same frail craft to become an 
institution even, half way down the final leap itself. 

If it be suggested that other religions, such, for exam- 
ple, as Buddhism’ and Mohammedanism, are also super- 
natural in their form, and have survived, one of them a 
third longer, and the other two-thirds as long, as Chris- 
tianity, 1t is enough to reply, as regards the latter, that 
all the forces of reality it had were stolen from Christian- 
ity, and that, in spite of these, it is now just upon the 
death; and, as regards the former, that while its machine- 
ries aie in form supernatural, it really undertakes to do 


ee ae a 


AS THEY OUGHT UNDER MERE NATURE. 415 


nothing, as against the lapse and disability of nature, but 
rather settles into the same disorder with it, and takes a 
show of perpetuity, because it flows with the current, and 
wins a kind of permanence which is only another name 
for the disability it creates. This is true of all the false 
religions: they belong to nature, and become constituent 
elements in that hell of disability which nature makes out 
of sin. Christianity rises, and raises its adherent races 
with it. ‘These others fall, and finally die, when their ad- 
herent races die out of the world, assisting and hastening 
that-event, each in itsown way. When, therefore, we con- 
sider that Christianity goes directly into a conflict with 
nature, calling nature death, and engaging to combat the 
death by its regenerative power, and that still, after so 
many centuries, it holds on victorious, what shall we 
infer, with greater certainty, than that the government of 
the world is with it, in its interest, engaged to give it suc- 
cess? Without or apart from this fact, it plainly could 
not have held its ground, even for a single year. No! 
Christianity stands, and will, because the God of Chris- 
tianity is the God of the world. The kingdom is not 
moved, and can uet be, as it certainly should under a 
mere providence ot natural causes, and that for the mani- 
fest reason, that all power in heaven. and in earth is given © 
into the hands of the king. And this brings us to a— 
If. Argument which is more general and more positive, 
viz. this; that, if we could make a perfectly intelligent 
survey of the great world’s history itself, and see how its 
principal events are turned, we should only discover the 
same thing on a larger scale; that the world itself is gov- 
erned in the interest of Christianity, or the supernatural 
grace and kingdom of Jesus Christ. We plainly can not 


416 PREPARATION OF 


undertake any such review, for the reason that no human | 


insight is equal to the task; but if we just glance along the | 


inventory, so to speak, of the matters of this history, re- 
ealling chapters by their titles, and only having in mind 
the relation of so many things to the central figure, Christ 
and his kingdom, we shall find that, in his glorious per- 
son, we get the key by which their mystery and meaning 
are solved, their practical harmony expounded. 

Thus we have the Jewish dispersion, before Christ, in 
all the principal cities of the world, and the establishment 
there of the synagogue worship; so that, when the apos- 
tles go abroad with their message, they have places in 
which to speak made ready, assemblies gathered, and what 
is more than all, minds prepared by Jewish symbols and 
associations, to receive the meaning of the new gospel, as 
related to a first dispensation of law; without which, as 
we have seen, its true place in God’s economy is undis- 
covered; without which too, it is bolted into the world, 
separately from all historic connections, and from all the 
evidences to be shown for it, by its fulfillment of ideas hid 
in ancient rites and forms. 

Next we observe that philosophy had just now culmi- 
nated among the Greeks and Romans, and was giving way 
‘as a force that is spent. The Sophists had run it into the 
ground. Faith in it was gone, and with that, all faith too 
in the gods of their religion. In this manner a deep and 
painful hunger was prepared, and multitudes of the most 
thoughtful minds were actually groping after the very 
food which Christ was to bring. 

At this time too the Greek tongue, which, for ages to 
come, was to be the general vehicle of thought and com- 
merce between the peoples of the world, had become, to a 


THE WORLD FOR CGHRIST. 417 


great extent, the vernacular of the country, and a Gentile 
speech or medium was thus made ready, to receive and 
convey the grace that is given to the Gentiles. 

The Romans too are now masters of the country, and 
the Roman Empire, of which it is become an integral part. 
is well nigh universal. When Christ therefore is crucified, 
it is, as it should be, the public act of the world, decreed 
by the Roman procurator in the name of the world. 
There is also now a more open state of society between the 
nations and races of mankind than was ever known before; 
because they are all, in fact, one empire. The apostles 
therefore may well enough go into all the world, as they 
are bidden, because the pass of a Roman citizen is good in 
all the world. 

It has also been noted as a remarkable fact, that when 
the Incarnate Word appears, it is a time of general peace; 
and it is remarkable, not only as a matter of poetic fitness, 
or esthetic propriety, but still more, in the deeper and more 
cogent sense of a practical necessity; for if Christ had 
come, in the tumult of a time of war, his glorious, but 
gentle, appeal of truth and love would have been utterly 
drowned and lost. In the din of so great noise and pas: 
sion, who could feel his want of a salvation? who be at- 
tracted by the beauty of a character? who descend to a 
cross to look for the Incarnate Word, and catch his mourn- 
ful testimony ? 

Take now these familiar facts, and what are they all but 
a visible preparation of human history for Christ, showing 
on how vast a scale the world is managed in the interest 
of Christ and his supernatural advent? Why else, too, do 
they all concur in time, when they might as well have 
happened centuries apart? Whence comes it that, when 


418 THE SUBSEQUENT HISTORY 


human history has been brewing in so great a ferment, fo1 
so many ages, all these great preparations should just now 
be ready, calling for the king with their common voice and 
sayinjs—the fullness of time is come’? 

As it was with the events that preceded and prepared 
the gospel, so it has been with those which followed its 
publication. They give us their true sense and guage of 
power, in the fact that they inaugurate a new era, called 
the christian era. And what are we to see in the simple 
Anno Domine of our dates and superscriptions, but that, 
for some reason, the great world-history has been bending 
itself to the lowly person of Jesus, from the hour of his 
miraculous advent onward through so many centuries of 
time. ‘The christian era! a new formation, speaking geo- 
logically, mm the domain of human life and society! 
Christ, who is called by many the impossible, the incredi- 
ble person, the gospeled carpenter raised into a mythic 
divinity—to him it is that the great world has so long 
bent itself, and dated its history from his year! So clearly 
is it signified, that the government of the world is waiting 
on Christianity, and working in its interest, and is thus, in 
highest virtuality, a supernatural kingdom. 

he events themselves of the new era indicate the same 
thing. First, we hear Porphyry and other assailants of 
the gospel complaining, strangely, that their gods are grown 
dumb, refusing any more to heal, or give oracles. The 
Jewish unbelievers are smitten next with a token of dis- 
couragement even more appalling, in the terrible siege and 
dreadful overthrow of their Holy city; in which they are 
shown, as convincingly as possible, that God has brought 
their ancient specialty of theocratic rule and distinction 
to a full end—just that which even nrophecy had foretold 


18 MANAGED FOR CHRIST. 419 


as the inaugural of a universal religion. After long and 
bitter persecutions, Constantine is finally enrolled as a 
convert, and Christianity takes the ascendant above all the 
gods of the empire. The northern hordes begin to pour 
down the Alps, overrunning the distracted and worn-out 
civilizations of the empire, and conquering, in fact, a relig- 
ion, by which they are themselves to be tamed and so 
cially regenerated. The false prophet appears, propagating 
his new dispensation by the fierce apostleship of arms, and 
the world is to be shown what is the value of a triune 
grace and gospel, by a grand collateral experiment, in 
which both trinity and grace are wanting. The crusaders 
follow in successive repetitions of defeat and disaster; as 
if God’s purpose were to stamp it on the christian sense 
of the nations, that Christianity is forbidden by the eter- 
nal proprieties of its mission, to strengthen itself by any 
victories but those of peace. The discovery of the mar- 
iner’s compass leads off the discoveries of Vasco de Gama 
and Columbus. Printing is invented, and the age of learn- 
ing revived, This prepares the great Reformation of relig- 
ion; for it, Luther; and for Luther, God so musters forces, 
as to give him always civil protection, keeping him in for- 
tress, and compelling even the combined fury of kings and 
kingdoms to pass by harmless. The Puritans are driven 
out of England, to plant their gospel of liberty and light 
on the shores of a new world. Cromwell breaks down 
the monarchy, to inaugurate, in England, religious tolera- 
tion; so to regenerate the laws and political liberties of the 
Knglish nation. The American Revolution, followed by 
the federal constitution, fulfills the christian aim of Puri- 
tanism, and lays all claims and titles of legitimacy at the 
feet of human liberty and progress. The wars of Napoleon 


430 THE SUBSEQUENT HISTORY 


follow, by which the oppressive dynasties of Europe are 
broken up or shattered, to let in the light of a new age of 
improvement. The revelations of christian science, mean 
time, are uncovering and transforming the world, tenfuld- 
ing its forces and uses, and all that constitutes its value, in 
a single generation. The grand commercial apostleship of 
steam and telegraph, hurrying the intercourse and short: 
ening the distances of the ends of the world, fixes the su- 
periority of the christian nations, and prepares the specdy 
sovereignty of the christian ideas. 

What now do we distinguish in these facts, but an out: 
standing, world-wide proof of the truth we just now stated, 
that the government of the world is in the interest of 
Christianity, and so far is itself a really continuous su- 
‘pernatural administration? These events are a kind of 
providential procession that we see, marching on to 
accomplish the one given result, the universal and final 
ascendancy of Jesus Christ. They march, too, in the 
beat of time, preserving their right order, and appearing, 
each, just when it is wanted, not before or after. When 
has it ever been seen that the government of the world was 
conspiring, in this large historic way, across the distance 
of remote ages, with any merely natural man, his teach- 
ings, or plans, or work? Whatever else may be true, this 
at least is plain, that between Christianity as a fabric all- 
supernatural, concerned for nothing but to do a supernat- 
ural work, and the world as mere nature, suffering noth- 
ing above nature to be, there ought to be, and indeed 
never could be any such concurrence. Besides, the progress 
indicated by these facts, is plainly impossible on the foot 
ing of mere nature; for nature, under sin, becomes, we 
have seen, a grand destructive causality rather, such as, 


IS MANAGED FOR CHRIST. 421 


running by its own mechanical laws, can of couse breed 
n0 result of self-restoration, but must run itself down- 
ward, instead, into a worse and more fatal deterioration. 
But it will be imagine] by some, that these are facts 
which we sbtain by gleaning; that, meantime, there is an 
abundance equally copious of adverse facts, such as have 
no concurrence with the gospel of Christ, but seem, in- 
stead, to offer only hindrance. What account, for exam- 
ple, can we make, of the dark ages so called, and of the 
confessedly base corruptions that have been allowed to 
overrun Christianity, as a doctrine of faith and salvation ? 
To this I answer, that, by this question, rightly viewed, 
is opened one of the most fruitful and convincing chapters 
of christian evidence; showing, as no other does, that 
Christianity is upheld by nothing but the fact, that the 
government of the world is with it. What could follow, 
but a corruption of Christianity, at the beginning, from 
our very belief in it? for by our faith we bring ourselves 
to it, as a contribution; contributing, of course, our 
misbegotten opinions, our confused passions, our habits, 
prejudices, weaknesses of every kind, and so infusing 
our poison, more or less hurtfully, into that which saves 
us; even as the patient will communicate his plague to 
his physician, or the bad wine give its smell to the jar 
into which it is poured. The disciple will as certainly 
give his form to Christianity, when he preaches it, or 
commends it, as he will receive a regenerated life from it. 
The new gospel, accordingly—it could not be otherwise— 
will go intc a grand process of corruption, at first, such 
as will perchance be called improvement, and the prob- 
lem of history will be, to settle and discriminate the truth, 


by winnowing out the forms of human error and corrup- 
36 


422 THE DARK AGES 


tion from it. Without some process of this kind, it could 
never be seen what really belongs to the gospel, and what 
to the unwisdom and unbelief of those in whom it dwells. 
As the gozpel was revealed to sin, so there was a different 
ind of necessity that the guspel should be revealed ex- 
perimentally through sin. Man, the believer, must, in 
cther words, be allowed to try his hand upon it, and make 
it his gospel—make’ it wiser by his philosophy, stronger 
by his regal patronage, more conspicuous and stately by 
the paraphernalia of forms and the robed officials he may 
dress up for its due embodiment. 

‘This is that mystery of iniquity that an apostle saw, 
even in his time, beginning to work; which he said must 
work, till it should be taken out of the way. This is 
that falling away first, that must come, the man of sin 
that must be revealed. It is not the papacy exactly, but 
that which made the papacy; viz., faith, not able, without 
a severe schooling, to mind the distinction between a sub- 
yecticn to and a supervision of the gospel; for, in becoming 
responsible for it as a servant, what will the new believer 
more certainly do than take it in charge, patrenize it, 
mend it, that is, disfigure and hide it? And there will 
be no limit to this wrong. Unable to stay content with 
the humble guise and the simple doctrine of the cross, he 
will exalt himself unwittingly above what is called God 
in the work, and will go on to be so grand a superviscr, 
that finally, as his sins are added to the forwardness of his 
service, we shall begin to see that he has contributed his 
whole self, and even taken God’s seat, in his preposterous 
ambition; becoming first the minister, then the vicar, and 
last of all, to give a true name, the usurper of Grod’s authority. 
Christianity is now in lus charge, and is nct improved by 


ACCOUNTED FOR. 423 


“ 


his additions. Disappointment follows; this compels a 
reconsideration, this a reformation, and so the true gospel 
is finally restored, with its reasons only certified, by 
the human abuse through which it has passed, and the 
lines of contrast drawn by so many miserable corruptions. 

Thus, at a very early period, we hear such men as 
Justin and Clement of Alexandria, proposing to give the 
christian doctrine the dress of a philosophy, and find 
them earnestly at work to accomplish a point of so great 
consequence, imagining that so it will be more able to 
command the respect of the learned, and will better sat- 
isfy the want of the world. The work goes on, till, at 
last, some centuries of dialectic industry may be said to 
have completely finished all that could be done, when lo! 
the beautiful, life-giving truths of Christ, offered by him 
to faith, are converted into a dry, scholastic jingle, ad- 
dressed to speculative reason, without value even to that, 
and as easily rejected as embraced. Monasticism and 
vows of celibacy are added in the same way, to give 
Christianity, in certain special examples, the advantage of 
a more superlative virtue than God had planned for, in 
the practical relations of life; finally to result in corrup- 
tions too monstrous ever to have been gendered in those 
relations. Constantine, having become a disciple, must 
needs contribute not his person only, but all the power of 
his throne, to the gospel, expecting in that manner to 
make it partake of his imperial pre-eminence, and become 
strong by 2 strength thus contributed. Uniting it, in this 
manner, to the state, he not only stays the woes of perse- 
eution, but he lifts the church into a rank of political as 
cendancy; which is the same as to say that he dooms it, 
for ages to come, to be the mother of all unholy arts and 


424 THE DARK AGRS 


oppressions, and the source of unspeakable public miseries, 
Gregory the Great can find no rest tc his prayers, till the 
church is consolidated under the acknowledged primacy 
of St. Peter; and when it is done, he may fitly rest in his 
prayers, having made the church such an organ of abuses, 
Oppressions, and religious woes, as the world had never 
seen before, and never will see again. Images and _pic- 
lures are at length *set up in the holy places, under the 
fair pretense that they are needed to represent the spirit: 
nal truths of religion to the eye, and so to accommodate 
the apprehension of weak and ignorant minds. And 
then, finally, behold! as the fruit of so great an improve: 
ment, whole nations of people worshiping the images, 
and before them, transformed into nations of idolaters! 
So the mystery works, and so the true gospel is becom- 
ing distinguished from the false, the gospel of the Son of 
God from man’s gospel of additions, improvements, and 
ary conceits. As Christ revealed his gospel by commu. 
nication, so here it is revealed again, as it needs must be, 
by the light and shade of historical experiment; settled, 
or adjusted, or practically defined, by use and abuse. 
‘These facts appear to be entirely adverse to Christianity. 
They are so, and, in that, have their value. That the 
government of the world, therefore, has passed by on the 
other side, and let Christianity fall in these facts, we are 
not to suppose. Being a gift to human liberty, it could 
not otherwise be established. When the experiment is 
finished, then the Divine Word will burst up into a second 
coming, through the human incrustations, consuming by 
his breath and destroying by his brightness, the accumu- 
Jated wisdoms and pomps of his mistaken followers, Tu 
all these losing agencies, there is yet no loss. The dark 


ACCOUNTED FCR. 495 


ages we speak of are yet in no backward motion. Stilt 
the march of Christian history is onward. If these bad 
iinpediments were not already raised, why, then they 
were yet to be raised. Just so far on its way to the state 
of universal dominion, is the gospel and supernatural 
kingdom of Jesus Christ. 

Still there have been events, it must be admitted, in 
what ‘s called Christian history, which are darker and 
more difficult of solution. They appear, at. first view, to 
have no place under a scheme of providential govern- 
ment, such as we are now supposing. And yet, if we 
could hold a longer reach of times, and seize the connee- 
tio1s of history with a broader grasp of intelligence, they 
might fall into place and become as transparent, under 
such a scheme, as any other. As it is, we can only sug- 
gest possibilities, and start guesses, and rest till our facul- 
ties grow to the dimensions of the subjects. What does 
it mean, for example, that the Jesuits and the Council of 
Trent were able to stop, or set a limit to, the Reformation 
of the church? We can not answer, and probably shall 
never know. Juke ali evil, it may be referrible to the 
necessary scope of human liberty. Or it may be that the 
Reformation itself was a thing too incomplete and partial 
to be allowed a sweep of universal triumph. It might 
have been a great disaster to the religion of Christ, to be 
resolved into a mere Reformationism, and left confronted 
by no antagonistic force. Why, again, was it, or how, 
that the churches of Northern Africa were allowed to be 
overrun by barbarians, and finally, in the loss of their 
faith, to give way utterly, and fall into extinction, before 
a barbarous religion? Was it that occasional examples 


of loss and retrocession nust be suffered, in order to the 
; 36* 


426 ADVERSE FACTS 


enforzement of a just responsibility for the gospel in its 
adherents and followers, otherwise ready to assume that, 
having God for its author, it will take care of itself? 
This we can not answer, but we can without difficulty 
imagine it to be so. Why, again, were the French Hu: 
yucnots, the religious hope and glory of their time, suf: 
fered to be butchered or expelled the kingdom? Was it 
that so many great and noble men might endanger again 
the simplicity of the truth, and could only give their most 
valuable testimony for Christ by theirdeath or exile? Or 
was it that Calvinism itself, preparing, at this time, to es- 
tablish a new type of individualism under its doctrine of 
an electing and special grace, and so to inaugurate a new 
state of ecclesiastical and civil liberty, might have stiff: 
ened, having God’s decrees all with it, into a form of 
christian absolutism too closely resembled to the faith of 
Mohammed, and must needs be tempered therefore, in 
this manner, by the experience of a predestinating coun- 
sel opposite, shaking even it to its fall? Or, if we ask 
why it is that so great decay of faith is suffered in Ger- 
many and in the Christian world generally, at the present 
time? why it is that learning is turned against the gospel, 
to explain it away, or reduce it to the terms of nature and 
speculative reason? the question may be dark to many, 
aud may seem to admit no satisfactory answer, Still, to 
any one who has thought deeply, it will be something to 
ask whether it was possible for the principle of faith ever 
to be set in its true post of honor, till the relations of na: 
ture and the supernatural are settled by a thorough dis. 
cussion, such as brings every truth of Christianity into 
question ? 

On the whole, we discover nothing in any of these dark. 


ee ee ee eee ee ee ae 


EE ——E—— Se 


| 


PROBABLY CCNSISTENT. 437 


est and most adverse facts of history, to shake our convic: 
tion that the world is governed, as we said at the begin- 
ning, in the interest of the incarnation or supernatural 
advent of Jesus Christ. Almost all the great staple 
events of history reveal this fact, in forms of palpable 
evidence, and if in some it seems to be less plain, there 
yet is nothing in them to dislodge our faith, even for a 
moment. Besides, we have always before us the one ma- 
jestic fact, that Christianity still lives. The church, being 
a supernatural institution, all history bends to it, and it 
proves its sublime peculiarity in the fact, that it is forever 
indestructible by time and its changes. The schools of 
Pythagoras, and all the great teachers after him, have 
flourished for a day, and vanished—tokens, all, of the 
but the church 
of Jesus Christ, the Nazarene teacher, stands from age to 


necessary frailty of mere natural wisdom 


age. It began with a feeble knot of disciples, it has 
spread itself over a vast field or kingdom, including in | 
its ample scope all the foremost nations and peoples of the 
world. Persecution has not crushed it, power has not 
beaten it back, time bas not abated its force, and, what is 
most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its own 
friends have never shaken its stability. Mohammedan- 
ism, punctually served and to the letter, by the bigoted 
fidelity of its adherents, grows old and dies in a much 
shorter time. Christianity, betrayed, corrupted, made to 
be the instrument of unutterable woes, by its disciples, is 
yet forbidden to die. God will not let the dissensions, the 
treasons, the unutterable and abominable profligacies, that 
are mortal to the life of other institutions, have any power 
of death upon it; upholding it visibly Himself, and 
showing by that sign, as he could by nothing else, that 


428 THE INTERNAL GOVERNMENT 


the settled purpose of his will is to estadlish it as the 
universal religion. 

But the government o1 the world includes, in its largest 
view, the interior history of souls. Before we arrive at: 
Christianity, therefore, what we there call the domain of 
the Spirit, and of spiritual experience, is to be classed un- 
der providential history. We cite, therefore, in this con- 
nection, 

III. As a distinct argument, the spiritual changes 
wrought in men, and the testimony given by the subjects of 
such changes. Nothing is better attested, than the fact, that 
men of our race, whether under Christianity, or without 
any knowledge of its truths, do undergo changes of char- 
acter and life, that can no way be accounted for, without 


Some reference to a supernatural power, such ‘as Chris- 


tianity affirms in the doctrine of the Spirit. The subjects 
themselves, can nowise account for the change, except by 
the supposition of a divine agency in them, superior to 
the laws of natural development, and also to any force of 
will they could themselves exert on their own dispositions, 
and the moral habit of their previous life. 

T'o change the type of a character, and above all, to do 
it in such a manner, that, from and after a given date, it 
shall be confessedly different, more widely different than 
if a thief were to become suddenly honest, a licentious 
man suddenly and delicately pure, a violent gentle, a 
cowardly heroic—this, it will be agreed, is a thing most 
difficult to be accomplished. Many will even declare it to 
be impossible; nothing more is possible, they will say, 
than for the subjects to sét their will to a reformation, 
which doubtless they may do, at any given moment, but, _ 


in doing it, how far off are they still from any change of 


OF SOULS IS WITH CHRIST, 499 


character; persisting against what struggles of perverse 
habit, heaving spasmodically under what loads of corrup- 
tion, ready “to fall again, how easily, back into what has 
all the while been and still is their character. But if they 
do, perchance, succeed in finally changing any thing, how 
slowly must the change be wrought. Even as one habit 
gives way to another, by a long and wearisome reiteration 
of practice. Exactly so it is, we admit, with all changes 
in mere natural character, all improvements in the plane 
of the natural life. If there is no force but mere will, 
acting in this plane, to change us, there can be no sudden 
reverse of character; no reverse at all, which is more rad- 
ical than what the phrenologists give us to expect, when 
they set us on courses of practice, to increase or diminish. 
given lobes of brain under the bony casement of the skull. 
Whoever undertakes any such improvement of his char- 
acter, ina bad point, doing it by his will, we expect to 
see relapse and fall back. We have a way indeed of say- 
ing, ‘it is in him,” when a bad man is repressing his par. — 
ticular sin; by which we mean to intimate our convic- 
tion, that what is in him will assuredly come out and 
show itself, even more flagrantly than ever. Thus we 
reason, and we are right in it, if no account be made of 
faith and the influence of a supernatural power. 

Thus it was that Celsus reasoned, utterly denying the 
credibility of any sudden change of character from bad to 
good, such as the christians spoke of; for, not being in 
the faith of Christ, he had no conception of the super- 
natural efficacy embodied in his plan of salvation He 
says, “those who are disposed by nature to vice, and 
accustomed to it, can not be transformed by punishment, 
much less by mercy; for to transform nature is a matter 


430 THE INTERNAL GOVERNMENT 


of extreme difficulty.” He did not understand, alas! 
what “mercy” s. But Origen does. Having it revealed 
in him, by his own holy experience, he replies, how 
beautifully, “When we see the doctrine Celsus calls fool- 
ish, operate, as with magical power, when we see how it 
brings a multitude, at once, from u life of lawless excesses 
to a well regulated one, from unrighteousness to goodness, 
from timidity to such strength of principle, that, for the 
sake of religion, they despise even death, have we not 
good reason for admiring the power of this doctrine.”* 

The picture given by Justin Martyr corresponds; at 
once proving itself by its own beauty, and revealing the 
hand of the divine Spirit, by whom it is wrought. “We, 
who once were slaves to lust, now delight in purity of 
morals; we, who once prized riches and possessions above 
all things, now contribute what we have to the common 
use; we, who once hated and murdered each other, and, 
on account of our differences, would not have a common 
hearth with those of the same tribe, now live in common 
with them, and pray for our enemies, and endeavor ta 
persuade those who hate us unjustly, that, living accord- 
ing to the admirable counsels of Christ, they may enjoy 
a good hope of obtaining the same blessings with our- 
selves, from God the ruler of us all.” 

That changes such as these are sometimes wrought im 
men and societies of men, under the gospel of Christ, we 
certainly know. There is almost no one who has not, 
sumetime, witnessed such examples. And yet, where com- 
munities are taken, the results will be so far mixed by 
cases of spurious faith, of hypocrisy, of backsliding, and 
apostasy, as to blur and sadly confuse the evidence dis 


~ + 


* Neander’s Mem. Crist. Life, p. 17. 4 1b., p. 61. 


ee 


oF SOULS IS WITH CHRIST. 431 


played Our best and least ambiguous examples of spir: 
itual renovation, therefore, will be found in the case of in: 
dividual persons. 

The case of Paul is familiar, and it is remarkable that 
no other ancient human character comes to us attested, in 
its genuineness, by such evidence. Whatever the learned 
critics say, or assume to show, concerning the gospels, 
there is certainly no myth in the epistles. When they 
come to these, their theory breaks down, their occupation 
is gone. That such a man as Pliny lived, and such a man 
as Cicero, is not as well attested, or shown by as good 
evidence, as that Paul the apostle lived, wrote the epis- 
tles ascribed to him, and bore the double character, first, 
of a persecutor and fierce enemy of the cross, then, by 
the grace of God revealed in him, that of a preacher of 
the cross; sacrificing all things, enduring all pains and 
severities, for the name of Christ, his Master. This 
change, he tells us, was a change supernaturally wrought, 
gives us the day and the hour on which his bad career 
was stopped, and shows himself to us and all the world, 
from that moment onward, to be another man. From a 
most bitter and relentless persecutor, he has become a be- 
liever in Christ, the most powerful, and chief advocate of 
his gospel. A profound self-evidence verifies the man and 
the change, and the divine life in him is not less visible. 
Mis own account of the change, which he testifies openly 
in every place, is that, ‘by the grace of God,” he is what 
he is-—-‘‘new-created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” 

And of such examples the church is full, in all ages. 


‘By some wondrous Providence in souls, if we do net ac- 


cept the christian mystery of the Spirit, a stream of new- 
creative power from God is entering into men’s hearts 


432 THE INTERNAL GOVERNMENT 


transforming their lives, and with this one uniform result, 
that, if Christianity is a fiction or a myth, it makes them, 
as certainly its friends and disciples, as it makes them 
better and more akin to God. 

Augustine, for example, was, before his conversion, a 
less violent end bloody man than Paul, had far less pre- 
tense of virtue, and a much feebler sense of principle, and 
was in fact a really less hopeful person, as regards the 
prospect of his becoming a holy character. And yet, 
from a given moment, onward, which moment is exactly 
specified in his ‘‘Confessions,” he becomes another charac- 
ter. Neither can it be said that he was turned about thus 
suddenly by some fit of superstition. He was nota super- 
stitious character, but a loose, free-thinking, sensual pev- 
son, whose habit was opposed to the spiritualities in every 
form. His own account of his conversicn is, that it wag 
the prayers of his saintly mother which took hold of bim, 
drawing down upon him, from above, that divine influ- 
ence and grace, by which his hfe was so remarkably 
changed. We can see too, for ourselves, in his whote 
subsequent life, his action, his temper, his great and massive 
thoughts, his burning contemplations, that he is lifted above 
his natural force, to be a man above himself. ‘The rhetori- 
clan is gone, and the apostle has taken his place. 

The conversion of Raymond Lull, of Col. Gardiner, of 
John Newton, of Dr Nelson, and of hundreds whom we 
know, as our living contemporaries in the church, corres- 
ponds. The number is so great in fact, examples of the 
kind so familiar, that any attempt to specify names must 
be insignificant. A. great many supposed changes of the 
kind turn out, as we admit, to have no sound reality and 
are followed by no correspondent change of life. It would 


OF SOULS IS WITH CHRIST. 433 


be so as a matter of course; just as there will be spurious 
examples of honesty, honor, and courage. But the 
spurious no more disproves the true in one case, than in 
the other. The question is simply this, whether, in given 
cases, we do not see men entered, more or less suddenly, 
by what is called their conversion, into another and differ- 
ent kind of life; the violent becoming gentle, the deceit- 
ful true, the covetous unworldly and liberal, the selfish 
benevolent and self-denying, profanity changed to prayer, 
drunkenness to sobriety, revenge to long-suffering, blood- 


thirstiness to love and compassion; the subject becoming 


thus, in truth, from that time onward, a confessedly new 
man, in all these his several habits and relations? We 
are all familiar, certainly, with such examples. They are 
among the most prominent and impressive facts, in the in- 
terior, personal history of mankind. And they are so 
well attested, in myriads of cases, by the practical results 
of the life, as to make the unbelief which denies their 
verity, or classes them as examples of spiritual illusion, a 
prejudice that arnounts to weakness, or supposes a real in- 
vapacity for evidence. 

Now in these changes of spiritual experience, called con: 
versions, the christian word, and the truths of the life of 
Jesus, are commonly supposed to have an important instru- 
mentality. The subjects uniformly say it, in the confessions 
they witness. They suppose that God, revealed in Christ, 
IS SO, by a transmission inward, revealed in their conscious: 
ness, But if Christ was only a simple, natural man, and 


if all which is reported of him in the gospels, transcend- 


ing the supposition of his simple humanity, is wild ex- 
cess, or legendary exaggeration, the account which refers 


these inward changes or conversions to Christ, can hardly 
37 


434 MEN ARE NOT CONVERTED 


be true. That any mere illusion should be followed, aye 
after aye, by such wondrous and manifestly real changes, 
making human souls visibly akin to God, is not to be 
supposed. That would be to account for the soundest 
and profoundest facts of human history, by referring them 
to causes most purely lanciful, and doctrines wide of all 
true intelligence. 

Here then we find ourselves, with these facts on our 
hands, without any christian truth to account for them. 
For when we have dismissed the gospels, or thrown them 
aside as unreliable, or incredible, these facts are not asmi- 
hilated. These converts, these transformed men—the 
grandest truths, and most quickening powers, and most 
glorious characters, in human history—are still left, living 
and blooming and blessing their times, for all these 
eighteen centuries. They certainly are no fictions, or 
myths, or fables of tradition. They testify, all, that they. 
are consciously transformed by some divine power. A 
kind of gospel is in them. God has wrought in them, if 
Christianity has not. Only it is remarkable that when 
they are so transformed by His inner visitation, they im- 
mediately declare for Christ, and cleave to him with ine- 
radicable affection. We seem thus, in fact, to discover 
that, as we are casting Christianity away, the government 
of the world is turning the inmost heart of the repenting 
and holy toward it, and giving, in that manner, indispu- 
table evidence that it is itself willing, whether we are £0 
or not, to serve in the interest of Christianity. 

It does not appear to have been as carefully considered 
as it should be, by the disciples of naturalism, in what 
manner these converts, and the testimony they give, is to 
be disposed of. For, in our view, they are even a more 


BY NATURE OR BY SELF-WILL. 435 


intractable subject to handle, than the gospels then: 
selves. ‘To deny the reality of their change, and reduce 
their whole life and experience. to a matter of illusion, 
requires a degree of effrontery and personal conceit, that 
would repel any critic of only ordinary intelligence. For 
in these Christian myriads, are grouped almost all the 
greatest scholars, philosophers, and lawgivers, the most 
revered and stateliest names, the most beautiful and hols- 
est characters of Christendom. 

It can not be said that these conversions are, in any 
sense, natural, or produced by natural causes, in the feel- 
ing and condition of the subjects. Their affinities are all 
visibly transcendent, and their life itself is, in one view, 2 
kind of protest againt nature and withdrawment from it, 

They are not changed, in this manner, by their own 
mere will. Whoever believes that a mortal man can take 
hold of the moral jargon, into which his thoughts and 
passions are cast by sin, willing himself back, item by 
item, into peace and harmony and the ennobled conscious: 
ness of good, ought to be able to believe in Christianity 
much more easily. A bad man may reduce, or hold in 
check, the evil instigations of his habit, by his mere will; 
he may even drag himself into positive acts of duty fa 
observance, and beccme a sturdy legalist in the practices 
of virtue; but to bring himself out into a luminous, joy- 
ous, and spontaneous virtue, and make himself free in 
good, as having the principle installed in his heart, is a 
different thing. Nothing, in short, is wider of all rational 
belief, than that the converted men or disciples of Chris- 
tianity could make the beginning, act the part, fashion 
the character, kindle the fires, and conquer the elevations, 
visibly displayed in their life doing it by their human will 


436 THEY ARE NOT CONVERTED 


But there is a certain inspiration, it may said, that flows 
into men, from the ideas they assume. ‘Thus, it may be 
conceived, that the supposed convert, in these remarkable 
transformations of life and character, received, first, a the- 
ological preconception, that a change thus and thus de- 
scribed is necessary to his salvation; and then, having his 
imagination powerfully excited, by the struggles of sup- 
posed guilt and danger he is in, he conceives at last, that 
the change required is actually passed upon him; where- 
upon he is set forward in high impulse, into a new style 
of life, correspondent with the auspicious hallucination that 
has triumphed over his sin. And this is really the most 
plausible account that can be made of these changes in 
the interior history of souls, which does not suppose them 
to be referrible to a supernatural divine agency or Prov- 
idence. | 

But what kind of mind is it that can be satisfied with 
one of its wise inventions, when, to account for the high- 
est and divinest range of fact in man’s spiritual history, 
it supposes whole myriads of the strongest minds, and 
noblest characters, to have been inspired with so much 
goodness all their lives long, by a hallucination? 

In the next place, we are led to inquire, why it is that 
ren pass no such crisis of inspiration in other matters? 
Whence comes it, that, having formed some preconception 
of honesty, truth, purity, wisdom, art, the auspicious hal- 
lucination that is to shape their transformation does not 
suddenly take them up, as here, and carry them forward 
into the inspired liberty? Why do not men become 
heroes, poets, lawgivers, in this manner? Have they not 
thoughts enough of being thus distinguished? and are not 
such kind of thoughts, in them, commonly hallucinations? 


BY THEIR PRECONCEPTIONS. 437 


But it is not true, in a very great multitude of 
cases, that any such preconception has been taken up. 
What thought had Paul, on the way te Damascus, of 
being converted to Christ as the necessary condition of 
his salvation? As little had Augustine, till his mind 
was opened from within to such a thought. Besides, we 
have multitudes of cases in our own time, where any 
such manner of accounting for the change of character 
actually wrought is plainly inadequate; cases, for exam- 
ple, where there is too little of personal vigor to carry 
out any preconception, even if a beginning were made in 
that manner. Thus a ministerial acquaintance, whose 
name is before the nation and the world, as a public 
name, had living in the place where he was pastor, 
a short-witted person, generally taken for an idiot, who, 
in addition to his natural disadvantages, was deep in 
the vices of profanity and drunkenness, At a time of 
general attention to the things of religion, this forlorn 
being came to him to inquire the way of salvation. The 
first impulse of prudence was to put him off, as being 
incapable of religious experience, and as one who would 
only turn it into mockery by his absurdities. On farther 
consideration, it was found to be rather a duty to give 
him even the greater attention, according to the propor: 
tion of his want. In a few days, it became a subject of 
mirth, with all the light-minded class of the community, 
that this man was aconyvert. The christian people looked 
on him with pity, and were silent; they had no hope of 
him. But from that hour-to this—and many years have 
how passed away—he has never faltered in his course, 
never yielded so much as an inch to his vicious habits 
His constancy ard consistency are even as much superior 

37* | 


438 IN MANY CASES 


to that of other disciples, as his simplicity is greater than 
theirs. . He is always in his place. He has worn out two 
or tkree bibles, for he had before learned to read a little, 
and now put himself to the task in earnest. He gets a 
few dollars of earnings, which he does not want, and goes 
to his pastor, requesting him to apply it to some good use, 
which he does not know how to select. When asked by 
his friends—for that is the general wonder—how it is that 
his old habits of profanity and drunkenness have never 
once gotten advantage of him, his uniform reply 1s, 
“Why, I have seen Jesus!” The critic of naturalism 
can not, of course, admit any such mystic notion as that 
—Jesus was a man, and, if he is any thing now, he is still ° 
aman. Will he account for such a character, initiated by 
a sudden change, by supposing a preconception that 
shapes it, and maintains it against infirmities so great, for 
such a course of years? There is a much deeper and 
more adequate philosophy in the subject himself’ Take 
his own account of it, and the fact is possible; take this 
other, and it 1s not. 

There are multitudes of cases also, in every age, where 
heathens who have never heard of Christ, or of any terms 
of salvation at all, and sometimes even the rudest of hea- 


thens, are passed into a manifestly new character, by a 
change correspondent, in every respect, with what is called 
gonversion under the gospel. And if God, as we main- 
tain, is reigning supernaturally over the world and in it, to 
establish and complete the kingdom of his Son, what shall 
we look for but to find sporadic cases of conversion, or 
gpiritual illumination, even among the heathen peoples, 
before the knowledge of Christ is received? 

Socrates is best conceived in this manner, and, according 


THERE ARE NO PRECONCEPTIONS. 439 


to his own impressions, he was guided supernaturally, by 
u secret grace and ministry, in whose te: ching he received 
all that most distinguished his personal aistory. Clement 
of Rome, as we have already observed, was a man myste- 
riously led, as by some divine impulse, and appears 
to have come into the spirit of a new-born life, before he 
had even heard of Christ. In him, therefore, his heart in- 
stantiy rested, finding there the grace that he wanted, and 
the divine beauty that he already longed for. 

And what forbids that we include in the reckoning ex: 
amples of a class more wild, where it is impossible to sus 
pect any distemper of the experience, under preconceptions 
imposed, either by philosophy or by the gospel—such, for 
example, as the strange devotee discovered by Brainard, 
among the children of the forest, and called by him “the 
conjurer.” “He said,” so Brainard represents, “that God 
had taught him his religion, and he wanted to find others 
who would join heartily with him in it. He believed God 
had some good people somewhere, who felt ashe did. He 
had not always felt as now, but had formerly been like 
the rest of the Indians till about four years before that 
time. ‘Then his heart, he said, was much distressed, so that 
he could not live among the Indians, but got away into 
the woods and lived alone there for months. At ‘length, 
he said, God comforted his heart, and showed him what 
he should do, and since that time he had known God, and 
tried to serve him, and loved all men, be they who they 
would, so as ne never did before.” 

Brainard was also told by the Indians, “that he opposed 
their drinking strong liquor with all his power, and that 
if, at any time, he could not dissuade them from it, he 
would leave them, and go crying into the woods. He was 


440 THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT 


looked upon and derided, among most of the In. 
dians, as a precise zealot, who made a needless noise 
about religious matters. There was something in his 
temper and disposition which looked more like true 
religion, than any I have ever observed among other 
heathens.’’* 

In the same manner, a forlorn woman, discovered by 
one of our missionaries, in the depths of Central Africa, 
is reported by him to have broken out, in the most affect: 
ing demonstrations of joy, when Christ was presented ta 
her mind, saying: “O, that is he who has come to me so 
often in my prayers. I could not find who he was!” 
And if God holds any terms of society and reciprocal feel. 
ing with our race, what should we more naturally expect, 
than that he will always be revealed, in this manner, to 
such as earnestly seek the right, and give play to their in- 
born, though distracted, affinities, longing. and searching, 
if haply they may find Him? But if God is revealed 
thus tenderly, even to minds in the darkness of heathen- 
ism, it is plain as it can be, that the great, internal changes 
of character we are discussing, are not to be accounted 
for by the preconceptions that are taken up and become 
operative in the subjects. | 

After all, this question is more naturally and satisfacto- 
rily handled, in the more ordimary form; viz., aS a ques: 
tion of christian experience; what it is, whether it sup- 
poses, necessarily, a supernatural power, and what is the 
real significance of the testimony given by so many wit- 
nesses for Christ? For the work of the Spirit, which is 
the christian conception, is but another name, as already 
intimated, for that supernatural Providence or government 


ened 


* Memoir, p. 174-5. 


18S GOVERNMENT IN SOULS. 44) 


of the world in souls, which, we are endeavoring to show 
is dispensed in the interest of Christianity. 

Tnaus we have vast crowds of witnesses, rising up in 
every age, who testify, out of their own consciousness, te 
the work of the Spirit, and the new-creating power of Je- 
sus, who, by the Spirit, is revealed, in their hearts. In 
nothing do they consent with a more hymn-like harmony 
than in the testimony that their inward transformation is 
a divine work—a new revelation of God, by the Spirit, in 
their human consciousness. They are such men too as 
the world are most wont to believe, on all other subjects. 
Neither has any one a particle of evidence to set against 
their testimony. All which the stiffest unbeliever can al- 
lege against them, is that he himself has no such con- 
sciousness, or has found no such discovery verified to his 
particular experience. They testify, on their part, with 
one voice, to a truth positive, and the whole opposing 
world can offer nothing, on its part, against their testi- 
mony, but the simple negative fact of having in them- 
selves no such experience. 

Meantime, their very word itself conveys a look of veri- 
similitude, and makes a show of God, so necessary to us, 
and so honorable to Him, that it challenyes the spontane- 
pus faith of every ingenuous and thoughtful soul. We 
never hear any single man of them speak of his better 
life as a development, or a something merely unfolded in 
him, by natural laws. No preacher preaches, no martyr 
goes to the fires in that vein. But they all talk of their 
faith, and of what God gives to their faith; the conscious 
irapotence of all their struggles with themselves, and the 
easy victory they find in God; how they are borne up as 
gn eagle’s wings, their wonderful light, their peace, the 


449, THIS IS THE WITNESS 


love they could not have to their enemies, but now, by 
Christ revealed within, are able to exercise, unstinted and 
free. Consciously they are not living in the plane of na- 
ture, they do and suffer things which nature can as little 
do, as she can raise the dead. They conquer their fears. 
God helping their faith. Pride, passion, habit, they sub- 
due in the same manner. Religious prejudices also, ani- 
mosities of race, the contempt of learning, and the bigotry 
of schools melt away in them, leaving a character that is 
visibly a new creation. Even the skeptic who has come 
to such a state of intellectual disease, that he ean no lon- 
ger find how to believe any thing, is filled and flooded 
with the light of God, in Christ and the Spirit, as soon as 
he can heartily ask it, with a will to be taught. And so 
we have a vast cloud of witnesses, testifying in all ages, to 
the reality of a supernatural grace, which is the root and 
power of all their works, and the hidden spring of their 
unspeakable joys. They know it to be so; for they con- 
sciously get their impulse wholly from without any terms 
of power in themselves, or of causality in nature. They 
could as easily believe that they make the rain in their 
own cisterns, as that their holy experiences are not from 
God Himself. So do they all testify with one voice—Paul, 
‘Clement, Origen, St. Bernard, Huss, Gerson, Luther, Fene- 
lon, Baxter, Flavel, Doddridge, Wesley, Edwards, Brain- 
ard, Taylor, all the innumerable host of believers that 
have entered into rest, whether it be the persecuted saint 
of the first age, driven home in his chariot of blood, or 
the saint who died but yesterday in the arms of his family. 
They live in the common consciousness of a power super- 
natural, saying—“ Yet not IJ, but Christ liveth in me.” 
Nothing, in short, would violate, or in real truth obiiter- 


OF THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS. 443 


ate, so much of the christian history, as to qualify it down 
to the mere terms of natural development. Indeed it 
would be the virtual expurgation from it of all the saints 
of God, whatever they have done, or been, or said. 

Holding the subject in this form, our critics of the natu: 
ralistic school commonly turn their account of the matter, 
in some such way as this. They say to Paul, Luther, 
Knox, Edwards, and, in fact, the whole church of God: 
“we do you full credit, as being made just as much better 
men as you say you are, and as being exercised subject: 
ively, in just the way you think you are. You are only 
mistaken, as we have now discovered, in respect to the 
manner and grounds of your experience. You have 
prayed and thought you were heard, you have believed 
and thought your success was a gift of faith, you have 
been strengthened against fears and pains of death—all 
you that have been martyrs—others have been strength- 
ened in their times of temptation, and you all think it was 
God who bore you up by the immediate gift of Himself: 
but we are able now to tell you that you were, so far, mis- 
taken. ‘There is a law of nature, by which all these things 
come to pass, and it is so fixed that nature will help you 
always, or even inspire you, just according to what you 
do. All this which you think comes from God, by a re- 
generative dispensation, is the development of nature, by 
a generative.” 

There would seem to be a rather remarkable defect of 
modesty in this assumption, of which it can not be sup: 
posed that its authors are themselves aware. It not only 
shows the whole church of God, that their conceptions of 
christian experience are mistaken, but it corrects them in 
precisely that which they testify, in the philosophic method 


444. THIS IS THE WITNESS 


itself, This, they say, we find by experiment. It is not 
our speculation, it is not any theoretic interpretation put on 
our experience, but it is our experience itself, When they 
say that God consciously strengthens them in their day 
of trial, gives them what to say, hears their prayers, 
keeps them in peace by the testimony that they please 
Him, fills them day and night with his fullness, and our 
modern critic runs to them to mend their phraseology, and 
shows them how to come at the same things in a more 
rational way, even by letting the divinity that is in them 
already have a free development, according to natural 
laws, it would not be strange if they should answer with 
a sigh, ‘Ah dear child, we can not get on thus; for all 
that bread on which we feed is manna that we gather, and 
not a loaf that is hid in our nature. Turn us down thus 
upon nature for a gospel, and our wings are cut. All 
that we know of God and divine things, we know by 
stretching upward and away from nature, and believing 
in God, as in Christ revealed. Every success we get, 
every joy we reach, comes of rejecting just that method, 
by which thou proposest to regulate our experience. May 
it not be that what thou hast discovered by reason, has 
kept thee from faith, and that still thou needest some one 
to teach thee, what be the first principles of the doctrine 
of Christ?” - . 


What we find then as the result of our inquiry is, that 
the government of the world shows the same hand which 
appears in the character and work of Jesus. In the first 
place, we discover that nothing takes place in the world 
that ought to take place, and even must take place, if the 
government and supreme law of things were confined to 


OF THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS. «AB 


mere nature and her processes. Next, we find that the 
issues of wars and discoveries, the migrations, diploma: 
cies, and great historic eras of races and nations, the extine 
tions and revivals of learning, and the persecutions and 
corruptions, not less than the reformations of churches, 
are all so modulated by the superintending government of 
the world, as to perpetuate the gospel of Christ, and, as far 
as we can see, to insure its ultimate triumph. Then pass- 
ing into the interior history of souls, which, after all, is the 
chief field of God’s government in the earth, we meet vast 
myriads of witnesses in all the walks of life, and in all the 
past ages, who profess to know God in the witness of their 
internal life and show, by tokens manifold and clear, that 
they are raised above themselves, in all that makes the: 
character of their life. To sum up all in one brief ex- 
pression, we have found a New Testament in the govern- 
ment of the world. It penetrates all depths of matter, 
heaves in the roll of the sea, administers back of the 
thrones, tempers the courses of history, restraining re- 
mainders and excesses of wrath, overturning, conserving, 
restoring, healing, and reaffirming thus, in all the grand 
affairs of human life, without and within, just what Christ 
the Word declares, when ascending to reign—AIl power is 
given unto me in heaven and in earth. What, in fact, do 
we see with our eyes, but that the scheme of the four gros- 


pels is the scheme of universal government itself? 
38 


CHAPTER XIV. 
MIRACLES AND SPIRITUAL GIFTS NOT DISCONTINUED 


Ir the world is managed supernaturally, or as being in 
the interest of Christianity, which is the doctrine main- 
tained in the last chapter, a subordinate and vastly infe- 
rior, though, to many, much more pressing question, re- 
mains to be settled; viz., what has become of the miracles 
and supernatural gifts of the gospel era? These were 
associated historically with the planting of Christianity. 
By such tokens Christ authenticated his mission, giving 
the like signs to his apostles, to be the authentication of 
theirs. What, then, it is peremptorily required of us to 
answer, has become of these miracles, these tongues, gifts 
of healing, prophecies? what, also, of the dreams, pre- 
sentiments, visits of angels? what of judgments falling 
visibly on the head of daring and sacrilegious crimes? 
what of possessions, magic, sorcery, necromancy? If 
these once were facts, why should they not be now? If 
they are incredible now, when were they less so? Does 
a fact become rational and possible by being carried back 
into other centuries of time? Is it given us to see that 
Christianity throws itself out boldly on its facts, in these 
matters, or does it come in the shy and cautious manner 
‘some appear to suppose, asserting a few miracles and 
half-mythologic marvels that occurred in the romantic 
ages of history, where no investigation can reach them; 
adding, to escape all demand of such now, in terms of 
present evidence, that they are discontinued, because 


THE CANON IS CLOSED, 447 


the canon is closed and there is no longer any use for 
them ? | 

Such a disposal of the question, it must be seen, wears 
a suspicious look. If miracles are inherently incredible, 
which is the impression at the root of our modern unbe- 
lief, evidently nothing is gained by thrusting them back 
into remote ages of time. If, on the other hand, they are 
inherently credible, why treat them as if they were not? 
raising ingenious and forced hypotheses to account for 
their non-occurrence? Christianity, it is true, is, in some 
sense, a complete organization, a work done that wants 
nothing added to finish it; but it does not follow that the 
canon of scripture is closed—that is a naked and violent 
assumption, supported by no word of scripture, and justi- 
fied by no inference from the complete organization of 
the gospel. For still, even according to Christ’s own 
thought, it was a complete mustard seed only; which, 
though it is complete as a seed, so that no additions can 
be made to it, has yet, nevertheless, much to do in the 
way of growth, and no one can be sure that other books 
of scripture may not some time be necessary for that. 
We do not even know that a new dispensation, or many 
such, may not be required to unfold this seed, and make 
it the full-grown tree. It may not be so. I have no 
present suspicion that any such new contributions, or va- 
rieties of ministration, are needed. But it is better not to 
assume that of which we have and can have no possible 
evidence; least of all are we called to do it, when the 
assumption itself is evidently made for a purpose, and 
wears a look of suspicion that weakens the respect of 
really important truths. 

As little does it follow that, if the canon of scripture is 


448 BUT IT DOES NOT FOLLOW 


closed up, there is no longer any use, or place, for mira- 
cles and spiritual gifts. That is a conclusion taken by a 
mere act of judgment, when plainly no judgment of mar 
is able to penetrate the secrets and grasp the economic 
reasons of God’s empire, with sufficient insight, to affirm 
any thing on a subject so deep and difficult. There may 
certainly be reasons for such miracles and gifts of the 
Spirit, apart from any authentication of new books of 
scripture. Indeed, they might possibly be wanted even 
the more, to break up the monotony likely to follow, 
when revelations have ceased, and the word of scripture 
is forever closed up; wanted also possibly to lift the 
church out of the abysses of a mere second-hand religion, 
keeping it alive and open to the realities of God’s imme- 
diate visitation. 

And yet, for these and such like reasons, it is very 
commonly assumed, and has been since the days of Chry- 
sostom, that miracles and all similar externalities of divine 
power have been discontinued. It is not observed that 
the date itself is contradicted by the reasons; for no book 
of scripture had then been written for at least two hund- 
red and fifty years; though the miracles had never come, 
as a matter of fact, to any supposed vanishing point, till 
that time. But, that miracles continued for two hundred 
and fifty years after there was no reason for them, is: no 
great obstruction to a theory of the fact and the reasons, 
after it has once gained acceptance. Hence there is 
almost nothing, known to be derived from the scripture 
itself} which is affirmed more positively, or with a more 
settled air of authority, than this discontinuance of mira- 
cles and spiritual gifts. Possibly some may even take it © 
as a heresy and a great scandal to the cause of truth, te 


THAT THE GIFTS ARE DISCONTINUED. 449 


suggest a possibility of mistake in the assumption. Nay, 
there are probably many christian teachers who would 
even think it a disorder in God’s realin itself, if now, in 
these modern times, these days of science, the well-gradu- 
ated uniformity of things were to be disturbed by an 
inruption of miraculous demonstrations. It would upset 
many whole chapters of theory. 

At the same time, there are classes of teachers and dis- 
ciples, now and then, who spring up, raising the question 
whether miracles are not restored, or some time to be re- 
stored? Even Archbishop Tillotson was of opinion that 
they probably enough might be, in the case of an attempt 
to publish the gospel among heathen nations.* But in 
all these cases, the point is virtually conceded that mira- 
cles have been discontinued; whereas the truer and mcre 
rational question is, whether they have not always re- 
mained, as in the apostolic age? Of course there have 
been cessations, here and there, just as there have been 
cessations of faith and decays of holy living; just as there 
are cessations of spiritual influence, for the same reason; 
though no one supposes, on that account, that the work 
of the Holy Spirit has been discontinued, and requires to 
be reinstituted, in order to be an existing fact. There is 
no likelihood that a miraculous dispensation would be re- 
stored, after being quite passed by and lost. But there 
may be casual suspensions and reappearances, some- 
times in one place, and sometimes in another, that are 
quite consistent with the conviction that the dispensa- 
tion is perpetual, never withdrawn, and never to be with- 


drawn. 
And this, on very deliberate and careful search, appears 


* Works, Vol. X., p. 230. 
33% 


450 THESE MERE PRODIGIES 


to be the true opinion. We are able too, it will be seen, ta 
verify this opinion by abundant facts. Of ccurse it is 
not implied, if we assert the continuance of these super 
natural demonstrations in all ages, that they will, in ou 
time, be mere repetitions, or formal continuations, of those 
which distinguished the apostolic age; it must be enough 
that such works appear, in forms adapted to our particular 
_time and stage of advancement. Many persons demand 
that Christianity shall do precisely the same things which 
it did, or claims to have done, in the first times; not ob- 
serving that the doing of > given thing is commonly a 
good reason why it should not be done again, and that 
the great law of adaptation, which isa first law of reason, 
will always require that there should be a change of ad- 
ministration, correspondent with our changes of state or 
condition. No one ever charges it as a defect of evidence 
for the supernatural gift of the decalogue, that God has 
not continued, since that day, to give decalogues from 
every hill. On the contrary, when Christ appears, taking 
away, in some sense, the first covenant, that he may estab- 
lish the second, we recognize a degree of evidence for 
both, in the fact itself that there is a show of progress in 
the transition. This progress of manner and kind we 
want in things supernatural, as well as in things natural ; 
else, if God were forever to repeat his old works, in their 
old forms, we should have a dull time of existence. 
What, then, if it should appear that our prophesyings, 
interpretations, healings, and other such gifts, have so far 
disguised their form, as to be sometimes recognized only 
with difficulty? Instead of discovering an objection to 
Christianity in the fact, what have we in it, possibly, but 
a confirmation of its rational evidence? And yet it is 


ARE NOT CHRISTIANITY. 45) 


chiefly remarkable, that the forms of the gifts are con- 
tinued with so little apparent variation.. 

It is very obvious, or ought to be, beforehand, that 
these prodigies are not Christianity; the substance is not 
in them; they are only signs and tokens of the substance, 
Their propagation, therefore, is no principal interest of 
Christianity, and the living power of Christianity is never 
to be tested by their frequency, or the impressiveness of 
their operations. There may evidently be too many of 
them, as well as too few. As soon as they begin to be 
taken for things principal, ex.for the real substance, they 
become idols and hindrances to faith. "When the world 
that ought to be repenting is taken up with staring, the 
sobriety of faith is lost in the gossip of credulity. And 
then, instead of a solid, ever-during reign of Provi- 
dence, that is governing the world in the interest of 
Christianity, we should have a glittering fire-work round 
us, that really governs nothing, has no power to regener- 
ate souls, or strengthen the kingdom of Christ in tne 
earth. Indeed, we actually see this folly beginning, in a 
very short time, to get possession of men’s minds, and 
find the apostles, on that account, contending most delib- 
erately against it.* It was a great evil that so many were 
more ready to figure in the gifts, or go after and admire 
the gifts, than to live by faith, and walk with Christ, and 
bear fruits meet for repentance. 

It is our impression, to speak frankly, that the party of 
discontinuance, and the party of restoration, and the party 
aiso of denial, who make so much of the fact that these 
prodigies are gone by, and are even conceded to be now 
incredible, do all concur in a partial misconception of 


SS — ee 


* 1 Cor., xii-x7v. 


452 USES AND LAWS 


their place in God’s economy, and: of their relative im- 
portance to it. To distinguish truly their office, we need 
to consider the two opposite extremes of character to 
which they are related. We are never to look at Ged’s 
means, as being perfect or not, in themselves; they are 
good only as medicine for a fevered and disordered nature 
in man, requiring also to be increased, or withdrawn, ac- 
cording to the oscillations of that imperfect and disjointed 
nature, as it swings to this or that opposite of excess. 

To see how these gifts operate, or what place they fill, 
ict us suppose it to be an accepted fact that God is reign- 
ing in a grand supernatural scheme of order, and govern- 
ing the world, externally and in souls, for Christianity’s 
sake; let it be understood and asserted that, even in 
things supernatural, God rules by eternal and fixed laws; 
and it will not be long, before the sottish habit of remain: 
ing sin, will begin to settle even christian souls into a stu- 
por of intellectual fatality. Does not every thing continue 
as it was from the beginning? Prayer becomes a kind of 
dumb-bell exercise, good as exercise, but never to be an- 
swered. The word is good to be exegetically handled, 
but there is no light of interpretation in souls, more im- 
mediate; all truth is to be second-hand truth, never a 
vital beam of God’s own light. To subside into sacra- 
ments, that are only priestly manipulations, is now easy. 
The drill of repetitions it is more readily hoped will 
wear into the rock, than that grace will dissolve it. A 
church-worship is easily taken for piety. Or, if there be 
uo external change of the moues of religion, it is itself 
lowered and disempowered, as much as if a lower and 
more earthly form were chosen. All the possibilities are 
narrowed and shrunk away. Expectation is gone —God 


Bi 
a 


> 


OF SUCH GIFTS 458 


is too far off, too much imprisoned by laws, tu allow ex- 
pectation from Him. The Christian world has been eray- 
itating, visibly, more and more, toward this vanishing 
point of faith, for whole centuries, and especially since 
the modern era of science began to shape the thoughts ot 
men by only scientific methods. Religion has fallen into 
the domain of the mere understanding, and so it has be- 
come a kind of wisdom not to believe much, therefore to 
expect as little. 

Now it is this descent to mere rationality that makes 
an occasion for the signs and wonders of the Spirit. The 
unbelieving and false spirit in half-sanctified minds, con- 
verts order into immobility, laws into lethargy, and the } 
piety that ought to be strong because God is great, grows 
torpid and weak under his greatness. Let him now break 
forth in miracle and holy gifts, let it be seen that he is 
still the living God, in the midst of his dead people, and 
they will be quickened to a resurrection by the sight. 
Now they see that God can do something still, and has 
his liberty. He can hear prayers, he can help them tri- 
umph in dark hours, their bosom sins he can help them 
master, all his promises in the scripture he can fulfill, and 
they go to him with great expectations. They see, in 
these gifts, that the scripture stands, that the graces, and 
works, and holy fruits of the apostolic age, are also for 
them. It is as if ‘they had now a proof experimental of 
the resources embodied in the Christian plan. The Living 
God, immediately revealed, and not historically only, be- 
gets a feeling of present life and power, and religion is nu 
inore a tradition, a second-hand light, but-a zrace of God 
onto salvation, operative now. 

But it will shortly begin tobe discovered, now, that the 


454 JUS ES SAND Geewe 


sin-spirit is weak on the opposite side, and runs to the 
opposite excess. Before, it went back to the understand- 
ing, to nature, and to general unbelief. Now it rushes on 
to fanaticism, and has even a pride in believing things 
really incredible. It does not follow, because one heals 
the sick, or speaks with tongues, that he is therefore clear 
of his moral infirmities, as a fallen man. He is taken 
with the stare of .multitudes, gives way to a subtle 
ambition, magnifies overmuch his. particular gift, runs 
into shows of conceit, grows impatient of contradiction, 
and loosens the rage of passion—by that, driving himself 
into even wild excesses both of opinion and practice —and 
finally coming to a full end, as one burnt up in the fierce- 
ness of his own heat. As before, without the miracles 
and the gifts, religion went down to extinction, under the 
wear of mere routine, so now the miracles and the gifts 
have issued in a wild Corinthianism, which whole chapters 
of apostolic lecture can hardly reduce to sobriety. And 
the result is, that now all the supernatural demonstrations 
are brought into disrespect, and a process begins of oscil- 
lation backward, to the ordinary and regular; then toward 
rationalism again, unbelief, and spiritual impotence. 

Now, between these two kinds of excess, the church ig 
always swinging, and by a kind of moral necessity must 
be. Itis not that God’s administration is irregular and 
desultory, but that such is the unsteadinéss and unreliable- 
ness of our poor disjointed humanity The oscillation 
back toward order and reason, is commonly longer and. 
more gradual; that toward miracles and gifts, shorter and 
sharper, because there is more heat and celerity in it, and 
less time is requisite to bring it to its limit. 

It need hardly be observed that every outbreak of 


OF THE GIFTS. {5&5 


supposed iniracle and supernatural demonstration has 
run ‘ts career in just this manner. It has begun with a 
ost fervent seeking unto God, and a remarkable single- 
ness of devotion to Christ. The mighty works appeared 
as revelations of divine power, scarcely expected by 
the subjects themselves, and there was no excess, except 
es the ideas and maxims of a non-expectant piety in the 
church, were scandalized by such displays of God. But 
there was no sufficient balance in the moral infirmities of a 
state of sin, to keep down the passions, and hold in check 
the wildness of conceit, and the consequence was, that | 
the subjects, unable to distinguish what was from God, 
and what from themselves, took their thoughts for oracles, 
and their fancies for visions, and very shortly ran the 
{rue work of God in them, into the ground. So it has 
been hitherto, and so it probably will be, till some age.or 
state 1s reached, where men are sufficiently modulated 
and sobered by truth, to have the heavenly gifts in terms 
of heavenly order, and be fired with all highest mount: 
ings of love, without setting on fire also 4he course of na- 
ture, in their corrupted hearts and bodies. Then the oscil- 
lations, of which we have spoken, will cease, the ordinary 
and regular life will be raised up to meet the extraordi- 
nary, and become a state of immediate divine knowledge 
and experience. Then the extraordinary, the miracles 
and gifts, wili lose out their explosive violence, and be- 
come the steady, calculable quantities of a really godly 
hfe. Thatis the true kingdom of God, fulfilled in its idea— 
His tabernacle pitched with men, Life is ncw an open 
state of first-hand experience, full of God, where the young 
men see visions, and the old men dream dreams, without 
becoming either visionary or dreamy in their excesses, 


456 WHY: THE LYING WONDERS 


where feeling and reason coalesce, and the dear humility 
of love chastens all the flaming victories of faith and 
prayer. 7 ! 

It has been a very common thing with christian teach 
ers, and even with the writers of deliberate history, te 
discredit all appearances of supernatural wonders, such 
as miracles and spiritual gifts, because they make so bad 
a figure in the end. ~ Whereas the true, and only true test 
of them is their beginning. We may as well test the 
opposite oscillation in this manner, and because it ends in 


the state of unbelief and all impotence—a religion without 
life and sanctifying power—have it as our conclusion that 
the convictions of order and holy regularity, which it set 
up at the beginning, are a dismal and cold illusion, dis- 
honored by its fruits. It is, doubtless, true that, as men 
judge, the excesses of fanaticism are less respectable than 
the excesses of deadness and immobility. It is so, be- 
cause the common vote of the world is on that side, mak- 
ing it always a most creditable thing to live in such dead- 
ness to God and all holy things, as answers no one of the 
intelligent uses of life. But whoever ponders thought- 
fully the question, will find ample room to doubt, which 
is really widest of a just respect, the excesses of fanaticism 
and false fire, or the comatose and dull impotence of a 
religion that worships God without expectation. 

It may occur to some, to raise the question, why it is, 
that the lying wonders of necromancy, and magic, and 
demoniacal possessions, are wont to be grouped contem- 
poraneously with the true wonders of prophecy and di- 
vine gifts. The answer is readily supplied by the general 
solution of the subject here offered. The two kinds, 
probably, are not strictly contemporaneous, and it is very 


ARE ATTENDANT. 457 


likely that the bad wonders will precede the others; even 
as they seem to do just at this particular crisis, For, after 
all the facts and functions of religion are reduced to a 
second-hand character—a reported history, a contrived and 
reasoned dogma, a drill of observances, where no fire 
burns, and no glimpses into eternity are opened by 
visions and revelations of the Lord, or where no God ap- 
pears to be found, who is nigh enough to support ex- 
pectation in his worshipers—then, at length, even the outer 
people of unbelief begin to ache in the sense of vacuity, 
and there, not unlikely, the pain is first felt.. Their relig- 
ious and supernatural instincts have been so long defraud- 
ed, that it would bea kind of satisfaction to get the silence 
broken, if only by some vision of a ghost—any thing to 
show or set open the world unknown. They would even 
go hunting, with Clement, for some one to raise them a 
spirit. Hence the strange zeal observable in the new 
sorcery of our day. Why, it shows the other world 
asa living fact! proves immortality! does more than any 
gospel ever did to certify us of these things! But the 
secret of this greedy, undistinguishing haste of delusion 
is the sharpness of the previous appetite; and that was 
caused by the abstinence of long privation. We had so 
far come into the kingdom of nullities—calling it the 
kingdom of God—we had become so rational, and 


gotten even God’s own liberty into such close terms of 
natural order, that the immediate, living realities of re- 
ligion, or religious experience, were under a doom of sup 
pression. It was as if there were no atmosphere to 
breathe, and the minds most remote from the impressions 
and associations of piety, naturally enough felt the hun ger 


first. Which hunger, alas! they are thinking to feed, by 
39 | 


458 SPORADIC CASES, DOUBTLESS, 


a superstitious trust, in the badly written, silly oracles of 
our new-discovered, scientific necromancy. But the chure?, 
also, or christian discipleship, begins of course to ache with 
the sane kind of pain, feeling after some way out of the 
dullness of a second-band faith, and the dryness of a 
merely reasoned gospel, and many of the most longing, 
most expectant souls, are seen waiting for some livelier, 
more apostolic demonstrations. They are tired, beyond 
bearing, of the mere school forms and defined notions; 
they want some kind of faith that shows God in living 
commerce with men, such as he youchsafed them in the 
former times. And if we can trust their report, they are 
not wholly disappointed. Probably enough, therefore, 
there may just now be coming forth a more distinct and 
_ widely-attested dispensation of gifts and miracles, than 
has been witnessed for centuries. If so, it will raise great 
expectations of the speedy and last triumph of holiness 
in the earth. But these expectations may be delayed. 
By and by the subjects of the gifts, or those who think 
to go beyond them, may begin to approach the bad ex 
treme on this side, Ambition may stimulate pretense, 


and the false heat of passion. Then come wild excesses; 


then a general collapse, in which the wonders cease. 
And perhaps only this may be gained; that the 
sense of something more immediate than a religion of 
second causes has been burned into christian souls, 
which it will take a century or two to exhaust. How- 
ever, as the sense of laws becomes more pervasively 
fixed in human thought, it is allowed us to believe that, 
as the gifts are themselves dispensed by fixed laws, the 
ehurch will gradually come to be in-them in that manner, 
and hold them in the even way of intelligence. 


IN ALL THE PAST AGES. 459 


Holding this general view of miracies, and sapernat- 
ural gifts, it should not surprise us to find sporadic cases 
reported here and there, in this or that age of the world; 
as little, to fall on periods in the church history, where 
large bodies of disciples, driven out into exile, or perse- 
cuted and hunted in their own country, are brought so 
close to God, and opened so completely to his Spirit, as 
to become prophets, and doers of mighty works. It may 
not be true in any age of the world, and probably is not, 
that such gifts are absolutely discontinued; so that no 
supernatural wonder of any kind takes place. Such won- 
ders will vary their form; but in some form, scriptural or 
providential, ancient or new, social or only personal, they 
could be distinguished probably by any one, having a - 
sufficient knowledge of facts. 

W hat is wanted, therefore, on this subject, in order to 
any sufficient impression, is a full, consecutive inventory 
of the supernatural events, or phenomena of the world. 
There is reason to suspect that many would, in that case, 
be greatly surprised by the commonness of the instances, 
Could they be collected and chronicled, in their rea! 
multitude, what is now felt to be their strangeness would 
quite vanish away, and possibly they would even seem to 
recur, much as in the more ancient times ef the world. 
But no such revision of history is possible. The material 
is accessible only in the most partial manner, and, if it 
were all at hand, could not be managed, or even be 
summed up, in such a recapitulation as cur present limits 
will permit. 

The first thing arrived at, by any one who prosecutes 
this kind of inquiry, apart from all prepossessions and 
saws of tradition, will certainly be, that the clumsy as. 


460 SUCH GIFTS APPEAR 


sumption commonly held, of a cessation of the original, 
apostolic gifts, at about some given date, is forever ex- 
ploded; for, as in fact they never consented to be 
stayed or concluded by any given time, so in history 
they persist in running by all time, till finally the investi- 
gator, unable to set down any date after which they 
were not, comes into the discovery that the stream is a 
river, flowing continuously through all ages, and always 
to flow. He could not give us the wonders of Ignatius, 
Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Ireneus, Tertul- 
han, Origen, and there declare the point of cessation to 
be reached. He would not come down to Cyprian, or 
Augustine, and settle it there, or down to Paul the Her- 
mit, and settle it there. The dreams of Huss, the proph- 
esyings of Luther, and Fox, and Archbishop Usher, the 
ecstasies of Xavier, with innumerable other wonders, and 
visitations of God, in the saints of the church, during all 
the intervening ages, bridge the gulf between us and the 
ancient times, and bring us to a question of miracles ana 
gifts, as a question of our own day and time. Such 
demonstrations became more nearly frivolous, when every 
thing was frivolous, and more visibly infected with super- 
stition, when the church itself fell under the shadow of 
this baleful power; but, though the evidences of super- 
natural facts were correspondently diminished, there was 
never any sufficient reason for the conclusion that they 
were quite gone by and finally discontinued. 

Tt has been a subject of wonder, that Mr. Newman, 
with all his remarkable powers as a writer, and a mah of 
genius, should venture on the deliberate attempt te 
vindicate the authenticity of the church miracles. And, 
probably enough, it is a fair subject of wonder, consider- 


— ee ee 


IN ALL AGES, 46i 


ing that his purpose required him to vindicate as wel! 
those which are trivial and ridiculous as those which wear 
the dignity of truth and reason. His argument must, of 
course, break down, under such a load of absurdities; but 
it does not follow that a more discriminative argument, 
unencumbered by church restrictions, would not fare 
differently. 

Descending now to the times we call modern, the times, 
for example, subsequent to the Reformation, nothing is 
easier, exactly contrary to the very common impression, 
than to show that the same kind of prodigies are current 
here, in the last three, as in the first three centuries of -the 
church. Whoever has read that christian classic “ The 
Scots Worthies,” has followed a stream of prophecies, and 
healings, and visible judgments, and specific answers to 
prayer, and discernments of spirits, corresponding, at all 
points, with the gifts and wonders of the apostolic age. 
And the men that figure in these gifts and powers, are 
the great names of the heroic age of religion in their 
country—Wishart, Knox, Erskine, Craig, Davidson, 
Simpson, Welch, Guthrie, Blair, Welwood, Cameron, Car- 
gill, and Peden. And it is a curious fact, in regard to 
this great subject, that, while we believe so little, and 
deny so much, and hold so many opposite assumptions, 
this same book of Howie, that chronicles in beautiful 
simplicity more gifts and wonders than all of Irving’s, 
is published by one of the largest and most conservative 
bodies of Christians in our country, and is read by thou- 
sands, young and old, with eager delight. Is it that we 
like miracles and supernatural wonders, so far off that we 
need not, or that we can, believe them? 


At a later period, on the repeal of the edict of Nantz, 
39* 


462 THEY APPEAR SUBSEQUENTLY 


and in the persecutions that followed, a large body of 
the Protestant or Reformed disciples, called Huguenots, 
hunted by their pursuers, fled to the mountains of Ce- 
vennes. Some of them also escaped to England and 
other Protestant countries. Among these unhappy peo- 
ple the miraculous gifts were developed, and by them 
were more or less widely disseminated abroad. They had 
tongues and interpretations of tongues. They had healings, 
and the discerning of spirits. They vrophesied in the Spirit. 
- Intelligent persons went out from Paris, to hear, observe, 
and make inquiry, and these people were much discussed as 
‘Les Trembleurs des Cevennes.” In England they were 
also discussed, as the “French Prophets,” and the fire 
they kindled in England, caught among some of the 
Hnglish disciples, and burned for many years.* 

About forty years after this appearing of the gifts 
among the Huguenots, a very similar development ap- 
peared among the Catholic or Jansenist population of Paris, 
Cures began to be wrought at the tomb of Saint Médard, 
and particularly of persons afflicted with convulsions. 


And, as the Jansenists were, at this time, under persecu- | 


tion at the hands of the Jesuits, and bearing witness, as 
they believed, for the truth of Christ, it is not wonderful 
that they began to be exercised, much as the Hugue- 
nots of the Cevennes had been. They had the gift of 
tongues, the discerning of spirits, and the gift of prophe- 
sying. These were called ‘“Convulsionnaires de Saint 
Médard,” because of the extatic state into which they 
seemed to be raised. + 

The sect of Frien1s, from George Fox downward, have 


et 


* Morning Watch, Vol IV., n. 383. {Ib., Vol. IV.. p. 386. 


ee eee 


~— ss -_— 2 eS” 


TO THE REFORMATION 463 


had it as a principle, to expect gifts, revelations, discern- 
ings of spirits, and indeed a complete divine movement. 
Thus Fox, over and above his many revelations, wrought, 
as multitudes believed, works of healing in the sick. 
Take the following references from the Index of his 
“Journal,” as affording, in the briefest form, a conception 
of the wonders he was supposed, and supposed himself to 
have wrought; ‘Miracles wrought by the power of God— 
The lame made whole—The diseased restored—A distracted 
woman healed 


A great man given over by physicians re- 
stored—Speaks to a sick man in Maryland, who was raised 
up by the Lord’s power—Prays the Lord to rebuke J. C’s 
infirmity, and the Lord by his power soon gave him ease.” 

Led on thus by Fox, the Friends have always claimed 
the continuance of the original gifts of the Spirit in the 
apostolic age, and have looked for them, we may almost 
say, in the ordinary course of their christian demonstra- 
tions. We are not surprised, therefore, to find such a 
man of policy and incomparable shrewdness as Isaac T. 
Hopper, believing as firmly in the prophetic gifts of hig 
friend, Arthur Howell, as in those of Isaiah, or Paul. 
This Howell was a preacher and leather currier in Phila- 
delphia, a man of perfect integrity in all the business of 
his life, and also a most gentle and benignant soul, in 
all his intercourse and society with men. One Sunday 
morning, on his way to Germantown, he met a funeral pro- 
cession, when, knowing nothing of the deceased, ‘it was 
suddenly revealed to him,” so says the history, “that the 
occupant of the coffin before him was a woman, whose 
life had been saddened by the suspicion of a crime which 
she never committed. ‘The impression became strong on 
his mind, that she wished him to make certain statements 


464 THESE GIFTS APPEAR 


at her funeral. When the customary services were fin 
ished, Arthur Howell rose and asked permission to spvak, 
“T did not know the deceased even by name,” said he, 
“but it is given me to say that she suffered much, and un- 
justly. Her neighbors generally suspected her of a crime 
that she did not commit; and, in a few weeks from this 
time, it will be clearly made manifest that she was inno- 
cent. A few hours before her death, she talked on this 
subject with the clergyman who attended upon her, and 
who is now present; and it is now given me to declare 
the communication she made to him on that occasion.” 

He then proceeded to relate the particulars of the inter 
view; to which the clergyman listened with evident aston: 
ishment. When the communication was finished, he said, 
“T do not know who this man is, or how he has obtained 
information on this subject; but certain it is, that he has 
repeated, word for word, a conversation which I supposed 
was known only to myself and the deceased.”* The ex- 
planation came, it is added, in exact accordance with 
Jiowell’s promise. a 

We are brought down, thus, to our own age and time— 
is it credible that the apostolic gifts and all the original 
wonders of the church are extant, or in real bestowment, 
even now? My argument does not imperatively require 
it of me to go this length, and say that they are. It is only 
a little better sustained on the supposition that they are. 
I am well aware, at the same time, that a sober recapitu- 
lation of what appear to be the facts of the question, will 
appear to many to be even a kind of weakness. Hnough 
that, consciously to myself, it requires. a much stronger 
balance of equilibrium, and a much firmer intellectual jus: 


oot 


* Life of Isaac T Hopper, pp. 258-60. 


IN OUR OWN TIME. 466 


tice, saying nothing of the necessary courage, to report 
these facts, without any protestations of dissent or dig. 
credit, than it would to toss them by, with derision, in 
compliance with the mere conventional notions, and cur- 
rent judgments of the times. I shall therefore dare to re- 
port as true, facts which, neither I, nor any body else, has 
even so much as a tolerable show of reason for denying 
or treating with lightness. | 

How many eases of definite answers to prayers, such ag 
are reported in the cases of Stilling, Franke, and others, 
are brought to our knowledge, every week in the year. 
Cases of definite premonition are reported so familiarly 
and circumstantially, as to make a considerable item in 
the newspaper literature of our time. Prophecies of good 
men, or sometimes of poets and other literary men, are go - 
often and particularly fulfilled, as to be the common won- 
der of the merely curious, who profess no faith in their 
verity, as communications from God. Dreams are reported, 
how often, foreshadowing facts, in a manner so pecuhar, as 
to forbid any supposition of accident, under conditions of 
chance. The state of trance is exemplified in Flavel and 
Tennent, and indeed hundreds of others, as remarkably as 
in Paul, in his vision of the third heaven. Cases are re- 
ported in every community, where the defiant wrath of 
blasphemy has been suddenly struck down, as by some 
bolt of invisible judgment; others, where a slowly coming 
retribution has so exactly retaliated the shape of a sin, as 
to raise the impression, that nothing but some directing 
will of God can account for the correspondence. A great 
sensation was made in the christian world, only a few 
years ago, by the recurrence of tongues, healings, prophe- 
cies, and other gifts, both in London, as connected with 


466 _ THESE GIFTS APPEAR 


the preaching of Mr. Irving, and at Port Glasgow in Scot. 
Jand, in the more humble but not less respectable demon- 
strations of the two MacDonalds. ‘The question has been 
very summarily disposed of, and the conclusion has been 
generally taken, that these reported cases of spiritual gifts 
were unworthy of credit—mere hallucinations of the par- 
ties concerned. On a deliberate revision of the question, 
I am induced to admit, and, since I have it, to eXpress, 
a very different impression. These MacDonalds, for ex- 
ample, are men of unimpeachable character, one of them, 
(as will be seen, from the cogent articles he wrote, remon- 
strating against the new churchism taken up at length by 
Mr. Irving,)a man of great calmness, and remarkably 
well poised in the balance of his understanding. And 
yet this man is not only gifted with a power of heal- 
ing the sick, but he is overtaken unexpectedly with the 
strange oift of tongues; viz., an ecstatic utterance, In words 
and sounds, which neither he, nor any that hear him, un- 
derstand. Now there is nothing in this apparent gibber- 
ish, that could any how become a temptation to the enthu- 
siast or the pretender. It seems, at first view, to be an 
exercise so wide of intelligence, as to create no impression 
of respect. And for just that reason it has the stronger 
evidence when it occurs; for, notwithstanding all that 1s 
said by the commentators about tongues imparted for the 
preaching of the gospel, I have found no one of all the 
reported cases of tongues, in which the tongue was intelli- 
gible, either to the speaker or the hearers, except as it was 
made so by a supernatural interpretation—which accords 
exactly, also, with what is said of tongues in the New 
Testament. And yet, on second thought, they have all 
the greater dignity and propriety, for just the reason that 


IN OUR OWN TIME 467 


they require another gift to make them intelligible. Fou 
this gift of tongues, representing the Divine Spirit as play- 
ing the vocal organs of a man, which are the delivering 
powers of intelligence in his organization, is designed te 
be asymbol to the world of the possibility and fact of a 
divine access to the soul, and a divine operation in it—z 
symbol more expressive, in fact, than any other could be 
And then it is the more exactly appropriate in its adapt: 
ation, that it wants another gift in the hearer, exactly cor: 
respondent, to understand it or give the interpretation. 
For so it is with all revelations of the Spirit, they are not 
only uttered or penned by inspiration, but they want a 
light of the Spirit in the receiver, to really apprehend their 
power. Not even the prophets understood their visions. 
Besides, there is I know not what sublimity in this gift 
of tongues, as related to the great mystery of language; 
suggesting, possibly, that all our tongues are from the 
Kternal Word, in souls; there being, in his intelligent 
nature as Word, millions doubtless of possible tongues, that 
are as real to him as the spoken tongues of the world. 
Tongues were also spoken every week in London, and 
there was much discussion there of the case, in particular, 
of Miss Fancourt as a case of healing. She was a crip- 
ple, reduced to a bed-ridden state, by a curve of the 
spine, and the painful disorder of almost all the joints of 
her body. She had been lying for two years on a couch, 
padded and curved, to suit her distorted form. Her 
family belonged to the established church, and she was 
herself a deeply christian person. A christian friend, whe 
had been greatly interested in her behalf, called one eve- 
ning, when the subject of miraculous healing was dis- 
cussed. The friend, Mr. Graves. was a believer in such’ 


468 OPINIONS OF THINKING MEN 


gifts, but Mr. Fancourt, the father, a genuinely christian 
person, was not. After a time, he disappeared, and 
during his absence from the room, Mr. G. arose, as Miss 
F. supposed, to take his leave. But instead of the “ good 
night” she expected, he commanded her to stand on her 
feet and walk. Forthwith she rose up, stood, walked, was 
clear of her pains, took on all the characters of a well 
person, and so continued. A great discussion was raised 
immediately in the public journals, and particularly be- 
tween the Morning Watch and the Christian Observer; in 
which the Observer took precisely the ground of Mr. Hume, 
as respects the credibility of miracles performed now; insist- 
ing that, henceforth, since the scripture time, ‘we must ad- 
mit any solution rather than a miracle.” Little wonder is 
it that we have difficulty in sustaining the historic facts of 
Christianity, when the most christian, most evangelic 
teachers, assume, so readily, the utter incredibility of any 
such gifts and wonders as the gospels report, and as they 
themselves have it for a righteousness to believe. 

But the doubt will be thrust upon us here, at the out-— 
set, as we come down to our own times—and it might as” 
well be discussed here, before we proceed to other cases in 
hand—whether such things are really credible now, or en- 
titled to even so much as the respectful consideration of 
thinking men. And I make no question that the class 
called thinking men, in our age, will be ready, with few 
exceptions, to reject, in the gross, and without hesitation, 
all such pretended facts. They are the illusions, it will be 
_ said, of ignorant minds, weakened by superstition, heated 
by religious enthusiasm ; stories that are published, it may 
be, witk honest intentions, but which any philosopher 
will dismiss without a moment’s consideration. 


HAVE LITTLE AUTHURITY HERE. 469 


But whoever is ready, in this manner, I reply, to erect 
the thinking men of an age, into a tribunal of authori- 
tative Judgment on such questions, has studied history to 
little purpose. ‘There certainly is such a thing as religious 
delusion, or a faith of ignorance, in the world, and the 
humbler class of people are somewhat more exposed to 
this kind of infirmity. But their demonstrations have 
never been as eccentric, or their mistakes as contagious, 
or as difficult to rectify, as those of the thinking class. In 
matters of thought and opinion, there is no end either to 
the new crudities generated, or the newer criticisms by 
which they are extirpated. New types of thought sway 
the successive ages. One school, or system, expels an- 
other. Nothing rests, nothing gets a final form, in which 
it either can or ought to stand. The thinking and 
educated class of minds, too, are less capable of many 
truths, because they are so generally preoccupied, wit- — 
tingly or unwittingly, by a contrary fashion, and have 
such an implicit faith in what the learned world pretends 
just then to have settled. On which account, our 
Saviour himself was obliged to seek his adherents, and 
raise up his apostles, among the ingenuous and humble 
poor, saying—I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven 
and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise 
and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. The 
wise and prudent knew so much, as even to be incapable 
of faith in him; and if there had been no other class 
but these learned gentlemen, these thinking men of their 
time, he would scarcely have left a follower. But tne 
fishermen, the babes of poverty, were less preoccupied, 
and capable. of better things. And for just this reason, 


abating their greater exposure to fantastic and extrava- 
40 


479 OPINIONS OF THINKING MEN 


gant delusions, it will be found, as a matter of fact, that 
the gospel of Christ has been more genuinely and 
evenly held, among this class, than it has among the 
professors and learned disciples. They testify one faith, 
and live one common life of grace, in all ages. 

In view of considerations like these, how much does it 
signify, that the thinking men of our time are so ready 
to pronounce on the’ incredibility, or even inadmissibility, 
of the supernatural facts just referred to? Nothing, it 
may be, but simply this; that the human mind, as edu- 
cated mind, is just now at the point of religious apogee; 
where it is occupied, or preoccupied by nature, and can not 
think it rational to suppose that God does any thing 
longer, which exceeds the causalities of nature. Is there, 
in this, any proper ground of assurance, that, within fifty 
years from ‘this time, it will not be set in a position to re- 
gard the faith of supernatural facts, as being even neces: 
sary to the rationality, and the complete system of the 
universe? If, as I have shown, by the argument here con- 
structed, we act supernaturally ourselves, and if the fact 
of sin supposes a higher ground of unity in God’s plan 
than is comprehended in mere nature, what less ought we 
to expect, than that, when the thinking mind of the world . 
has finally worn a way through nature, ceasing to be ham- 
pered and shut in by it as now, it will strike into a broad- 
er ficld, and be as ready to believe these supernatural 
facts, as it is at present to reject them? Indeed, there is 
a kind of law in skepticism itself, that must final-y bring 
it back from its denial of a supernatural revelation, to a 
hearty and hungry embrace of it; for, no longer staggered 
by the supposition, as thousands now are, that the serip- 
tures represent a dispensation gone by, which is hence- 


HAVE LITTLE AUTHORITY HERE 471 


forth incredible, it will finally discover that they may be 
rationally believed, for just the reason that God is doing 
similar wonders now. And as certainly as no human soul 
can rest in mere negation, or, what is no better, in nature 
as the only medium and symbol of religion, this discovery | 
will be made. ‘There are, in fact, two roads into this faith, 
the direct road, and the indirect or round-about road of 
doubt and denial. One is taken by the humble, godly 
souls, whose only want it is to find their Lord, and walk 
with him; these go straight in, to his seat, know him in 
his private testimony, and the glorious induement of his 
power. The others, wanting only to find him scientifi- 
cally, begin at nature, jealous of all but nature. They 
go round and round their idol, looking to find a Creator, 
and Christianity, and a present living God, in it, and, after 
they have torn their feet long enough, in beating through 
the briars of scientific reason, they will finally come in, 
as laggards, weary and sore, and join themselves to the 
little ones of faith, saying truly, “this, after all, is rea- 
son; to believe the scriptures, just because the God 
of the scriptures is the God of to-day; as conversable 
now as ever, working as mightily, redeeming as glori- 
ously; to believe in the supernatural, too, because we be- 
lieve in nature; which, without and apart from this neces- 
sary complement, were only a worthless abortion, a frac- 
tion whose integer is lost.” © 

It is also a matter worthy of particular note, when we 
are falling into the impression, that a verdict of the think- 
ing men of our time, is entitled to authority on such a 
question as this, that we have so many characters im 
history which they can no way interpret, and which are 
in facet impossible to exist, under their theory. How 


472 THEY MAKE NO GOOD ACCOUNT 


awkwardly do they handle such characters, and how 
poorly do they get on in their attempts to solve, or even 
to conceive them. Joan of Arc, for instance—who has 
not observed the strange figure of imbccility made by 
the modern school of literary unbelief, in the attempt to 
find a place for any such character? They can do nothing 
with her. In their view, she is impossible. And yet she 
has a place in history, and enters into the public life of 
the French nation, as a determining cause of great events, 
in the same manner as Charlemagne, or any celebrated 
commander. She is a phenomenon, for which naturalism 
has no account, and which, under that kind of philosophy, 
had no right to happen. It can say that she was a prod- 
igy of straw got up by the leaders, who sought in that 
manner to retrieve the desperate state of their cause; or, 
that she was insane; or that she was romantic; or that 
she was a nervous and flighty girl, doing she scarce knew 
what; or, finally, that she is a myth, and no real person- 
age. And yet the history laughs at all such wisdom, 
showing us a character real and true, that refuses to be 
explained by any such feeble inventions in the plane of 
nature, and can be nowise comprehended in that manner, 
She begins to be intelligible only when she is classed with 
Deborah, as a chieftain called out from the retirement of 
her sex, by the election of God, and prepared, supernatu- 
rally, in the place of secret vision. 

The same thing, in general, may be said of the inter- 
preters of Cromwell. Nothing can be made of him as a 
mere natural man. Hume and Clarendon call him a re- 
ligious hypocrite; as if a hypocrite could be a hero{ 
Lamartine, simply because he believes in a light which is 
not church light, calls him a fanatic. Carlyle is wiser 


OF KNOWN HISTORIC CHARACTERS. 473 


and, as far as possible, contrives to let him report himself; 
but as soon as he chances to loosen his own selfretention, 
_ for a moment, and let us see the man through his panthe- 
istic glasses, 2 strange letting down will be observed, how- 
ever slight or casual the glimpse taken—it 1s Cromwell by 
moonlight, and not the real hero. He ceases to be in- 
spired, and begins to phosphoresce. He is no more a 
battle-axe, swung by the Lord Almighty, but one that lays 
on automatically, with force enough to make us think 
that he is. He is great in his faith, only it turns out that 
his faith, meeting no real object, is, though he thinks it 
not, a merely subjective impulse. Known to be a stout 
predestinarian, he is fitly shown to be a thunder 
shock in battle, as by the momentum of God’s eternal 
will in his person; only it is recollected that predestina- 
tion, by God, is more philosophically phrased by the 
single word destiny; a force without will, or counsel, or 
end. He is great in power therefore, invincible, irresisti- 
ble, as being set on by the universal Nobody. Is this 
Cromwell? No genuine Cromwell is found, till he is 
shown by the side of Moses, a man who takes power as a 
burden set upon him by God, and wields it only the more 
sternly and faithfully, as power; a man “not eloquent,” 
but ‘slow of speech,” coming down out of the mount, 
where God has taught him, to be the leader, liberator, 
and lawgiver of his people. This is the view of Crom- 
well toward which historic criticism runs more and more 
distinctly, and when, at some future day, our literature — 
has gotten over the shallows of naturalism, and dares to 
speak of faith, this will be the Cromwell shown. He 
may not be counted a man equal to Moses, but alJl that is 


most distinctive and greatest in his life will as certainly 
40* 


474, SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT 


be referred to a supernatural ard divine movement in 
him. 

And how many characters are there in the history of 
our modern world, who can as little be conceived on the 
footing of mere nature, asthese. Savonarola, the ‘‘ fanatic” 
of history, will emerge, not unlikely, clad in the honors 
of a prophet. So of Columbus, Fenelon, Fox, Franke, and 
a thousand others, who walked, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, by a supernatural instigation—they were nothing, 
it will be seen, save by the secret inspiration that bore 
them on. And how many of God’s little ones, living and 
dying in obscurity, have yet done as great wonders in 
His name, as if they had been teachers and heroes. 

But why is it, some will ask, that we have only to hear 
of these things, and do not see them? Why must we 
know them only through a degree of distance that takes 
away knowledge? But the truth is not exactly so. We 
come a great deal closer to them than we think. Having 
had this great question of supernatural fact upon my 
hands now for a number of years, in a determination also 
to be concluded by no mere conventionalities, to observe, 
inquire, listen, and judge, I have been surprised to find 
how many things were coming to my knowledge and 
acquaintance, that most persons take it for granted are 
utterly incredible, except in what they call the age of 
miracles and apostolic gifts; that is, in the first three cen- 
turies of the church. Indeed, they are become so famil- 
iar, after only a few years of attention thus directed, and 
without inquiring after them, that their unfamiliar and 
strange look is gone; they even appear to belong, more or 
less commonly, to the church and the general economy of 
the Spirit. 


IN OUR OWN TIMES. 475 


I will instance, first of all, a case not so clearly re- 
ligious, but explicable in no way, by the mere causalities 
of nature. AsI sat by the fire, one stormy November 
night, in a hotel parlor, in the Napa Valley of California, 
there came in a most venerable and benignant looking 
person, with his wife, taking their seats in the circle. 
The stranger, as I afterward learned, was Captain Yonnt, 
a man who came over into California, as a trapper, more 
than forty years ago. Here he has lived, apart from the 
great world and its questions, acquiring an immense landed 
estate, and becoming a kind of acknowledged patriarch 
in the country. His tall, manly person, and his gracious, 
paternal look, as totally unsophisticated in the expression, 
as if he had never heard of a philosophic doubt or ques: 
tion in his life, marked him as the true patriarch. The 
conversation turned, I know not how, on spiritisn and 
the modern necromancy, and he discovered a degree of 
inclination to believe in the reported mysteries. His 
wife, a much younger and apparently christian person, 
intimated that probably he was predisposed to this kind 
of faith, by a very peculiar experience of his own, and 
evidently desired that he might be drawn out by some 
intelligent discussion of his queries. 

At my request, he gave me his story. About six or 
seven years previous, In a mid-winter’s night, he had a 
dream, in which he saw what appeared to be a company of 
emigrants, arrested by the shows of the mountains, and 
perishing rapidly by cold and hunger. He noted the very 
cast of the scenery, marked by a huge perpendicular front 
of white rock cliff; he saw the men cutting off what ap- 
peared to be tree tops, rising out of deep gulfs of snow; 
he distinguished the very features of the persons, and the: 


476 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT 


Jook of their particular distress. _ He woke, profoundly 
impressed with the distinctness and apparent reality of his 
dream. At length he fell asleep, and dreamed exactly the 
sane dream again., In the morning he could not expel 
it from his mind, Falling in, shortly, with an old hunter 
comrade, he told him the story, and was only the more 
deeply impressed, by his recognizing, without hesitation, 
the scenery of the dream. This comrade came over the 
Sierra, by the Carson Valley Pass, and declared that a spot 
in the pass answered exactly to his description. By this, 
the unsophisticated patriarch was decided. He immedi- 
ately collected a company of men, with mules and blank 
ets, and all necessary provisions. The neighbors were 
laughing, meantime, at his credulity. ‘‘No matter,” said 
he, ‘Lam able to do this, and I will, for I verily believe 
that the fact is according to my dream.” The men were 
sent into the mountains, one hundred and fifty miles dis 
tant, directly to the Carson Valley Pass. And there they 
found the company, in exactly the condition of the dream, 
and brought in the remnant alive. 

A gentleman present said, ‘you need have no doubt 
of this; for we Californians all know the facts, and the 
names of the families brought in, who now look upon 
our venerable friend as a kind of saviour. These names 
he gave, and the places where they reside, and I found, 
afterward, that the California people were ready, every 
where, to second his testimony. 

Nothing could be more natural, than for the good- 
hearted patriarch himself to add, that the brightest thing 
in his life, and that which gave him greatest joy, was his 
simple faith in that dream. I thought also I could see in 
that joy, the glimmer of a true christian love and life, 


IN OUR OWN TIMES. 477 


into which, unawares to himself, he had really been en- 
tered by that faith. Let any one attempt now to account 
for the coincidences of that dream, by mere natural causali- 
ties, and he will be glad enough to ease his labor, by the 
acknowledgment of a supernatural Providence. 

I fell in also, in that new world, with a different 
and more directly christian example, in the case of an 
acquaintance, whom I had known for the last twenty 
years; an educated man, in successful practice as a physi- 
cian; a man who makes no affectations of piety, and puts 
on no airs of sanctimony; living always in a kind of jovial 
element, and serving every body but himself. He laughs 
at the current incredulity of men, respecting prayer, and 
relates many instances, out of his own experience, to show 
—for that is his doctrine—that God will certainly hear 
every man’s prayer, if only he is honest in it. Among 
others, he gave the following:—He had hired his little 
house, of one room, in a new trading town that was plant- 
ed last year, agreeing to give a rent for it of ten dollars . 
per month. At length, on the day preceding the rent day, 
he found that he had nothing in hand to meet the pay- 
ment, and could not see at all whence the money was to 
come. Consulting with his wife, they agreed that prayer, 
so often tried, was their only hope. They went, accord- 
ingly to prayer, and found assurance that their want should 
be supplied. That was the end of their trouble, and there 
they rested, dismissing farther concern. But the morning 
came, and the money did not. The rent owner made his 
appearance earlier than usual. As he entered the door, 
their hearts began to sink, whispering that now, for 
once, they must give it up, and allow that prayer had 
failed. But before the demand was made, a neighbor 


478 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT 


coming in, called out the untimely visitor, engaging him 
in conversation, a few minutes, at the door. Meantime a 


stranger came in, saying, “ Dr. I owe you ten dollars, 
for attending me in a fever, at such a time, and here is the 
money.” He could muster no recollection, either of the 
man or of the service, but was willing to be convinced, and 
so had the money in hand, after all, when the demand was 
made. When Stilling and Franke recite their multitudes 
of specific answers to prayer, their reports are very hast- 
ily discredited by many, because of their strangeness. 
But I have heard so many examples, personally, of the 
kind just cited, that I begin to think they are even com- 
mon. 
Nothing is farther off from the christian expectation 
of our New England communities, than the gift of tongues, 
So distant is their practical habit from any belief in the 
possible occurrence, that not even the question occurs to 
their thought. And yet, a very near christian friend, intel- 
ligent in the highest degree, and perfectly reliable to me , 
as my right hand, who was present at a rather private, 
social gathering of christian disciples, assembled to con- 
verse and pray together, as in reference to some of the 
higher possibilities of christian sanctification, relates that, 
after one of the brethren had been speaking, in a strain 


of discouraging self-accusation, another present shortly | 


rose, with a strangely beaming look, and, fixing hig eyo 
on the confessing brother, broke out in a discourse of 
sounds, wholly unintelligible, though apparently a true 
language, accompanying the utterances with a very strange 
and peculiarly impressive gesture, such as he never made 
at any other time; coming finally to a kind of pause, 
and commencing again, as if at the same point, to go ovel 


IN OUR OWN TIMES. 475 


m English, with exactly the same gestures, what had just 
been said. It appeared to be an interpretation, and the 
matter of it was, a beaatifully emphatic utterance of the 
great principle of self-renunciation, by which the desired 
victory over self is to be obtained. There had been nu 
sonversation respecting gifts of any kind, and no ret: 
erence to their possibility. The circle were astounded 
by the demonstration, not knowing what to make of 
it. The instinct of prudence threw them on observing 
a general silence, and it is a curious fact that the public 
in H—— have never, to this hour, been startled by so 
much as a rumor of the gift of tongues, neither has the 
name of the speaker been associated with so much as a 
surmise of the real or supposed fact, by which he would 
be, perhaps, unenviably distinguished. It has been a 
great trial to him, it is said, to submit himself to this 
demonstration; which has recurred several times. 

I have heard also of as many as three distinct cases of 
healing near at hand; one where a father whose nearly 
grown-up daughter, supposed to be near to death, under 
the ravages of a brain fever, was permitted, in answer 
to his prayers, to see her rise up almost immediately, and 
the next day walking forth completely well; one where a 
bad and dangerous swelling was immediately cured; an- 
other where a sick man was restored, when life was 
despaired of by his family. 

In addition to these more domestic examples, I became 
acquainted, about two years ago, in a distant part of the 
world, with an English gentleman, whose faith in the gift 
of healing had been established by his own personal ex- 
ercise of it. He wasa man whose connections and culture, 
whose well-formed, tall, and robust looking person, whose 


480 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT 


beautifully simple and humble manners, and whose blame 
less, universally respected life among strangers not of the 
same faith, and knowing him only by his virtues and the 

sacrifices he was making for his opinions, were so many 
conspiring tokens winning him a character of confidence, 
that excluded any rational distrust of his representations. 
Wie gave me a full account, in manuscript, of some of the 
cases in which the healing power appeared to be given him, 
with liberty to use them, as may best serve the convenience 
of my present subject. 

It became a question with him, soon after his conver-— 
sion, whether, as he had been healed spiritually, he ought 
not also to expect and receive the healing of his body by 
the same faith; for he had then been an invalid for a long ~ 
time, with only aslender hope of recovery. After a hard 
struggle of mind, he was able, dismissing all his prescribed 
remedies, to throw himself on God, and was mene 
and permanently made whole. 

At length, one of his children, whom he had with him, 
away from home, was taken ill with a scarlet fever. And 
“now the question was,” I give his own words, ‘what 
was to be done? The Lord had indeed healed my own 
sicknesses, but would he heal my son? I conferred witb 
a brother in the Lord, who, having no faith in Christ’s heal: 
ing power, urged me to send instantly for the doctor, and 
dispatched his groom on horseback to fetch him. Before 
the doctor arrived, my mind was filled with revelation on 
the subject. I saw that I had fallen into a snare, by turn- 
_ ing away from the Lord’s healing hand, to lean on mcdieal 
skill. I felt grievously condemned in my conscience. A 
fear also fe'l on me, that if I persevered in this unbeliev- 
ing course, my son would die, as his eldest brother had. 


IN OUR OWN TIMES. 481 


The symptoms in both were precisely similar. The doc- 
tor arrived. My son, he said, was suffering from a scarlet 
fever, and medicine should be sent immediately. While 
he stood prescribing, I resolved to withdraw the child, and 
cast him on the Lord. And when he was gone, I called 
the nurse and told her to take the child into the nursery 
and Jay him on the bed. I then fell on my knees confess- 
ing the sin I had committed against the Lord’s healing 
power. JI also prayed most earnestly that it would please 
my Heavenly Father to forgive my sin, and to show that 
he forgave it, by causing the fever to be rebuked. I re- 
ceived a mighty conviction that my prayer was heard, 
and I arose and went to the nursery, at the end of a long 
passage, to see what the Lord had done, and on opening 
the door, to my astonishment, the boy was sitting up in 
his bed, and on seeing me cried out, ‘I am quite well and 
want to have my dinner.’ In an hour he was dressed, 
and well, and eating his dinner; and when the physic ar- 
rived it was cast out of the window. Next morning the 
doctor returned, and on meeting me at the garden gate, 
he said, ‘I hope your son is no worse!’ ‘He is very well, 
I thank you,’ said I, in reply. ‘What can you mean,’ re- 
jomed the doctor. ‘I will tell you, come in and sit down.’ 
I then told him all that had occurred, at which he fairly 
gasped with surprise. ‘May I see your son,’ he asked. 
‘Certainly, doctor, but I see that you do not believe.’ We 
proceeded up stairs, and my son was playing with hig 
brother, on the floor. The doctor felt his pulse and said, 
‘Yes, the fever is gone.’ Finding also a fine, healthy 
surface on his tongue, he added, ‘Yes, he is quite well, I 
suppose it was the crisis of his disease!’” 


Another of the eases which he reports, shows more fully 
4] 


482 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT 


the working of his own mind, on the instant of healing 

It was the case of a poor man’s child, who had heard 
him advocate the faith of healing, and, now that the phy- 
sician, after attending him for many months of illness, 
had given the little patient up, saying that he could do no 
more, the parents sent for him, in their extremity, to 
come and heal their son. He replied to the father, ““My 

dear friend, I can not heal your son, I can do nothing to 
help him. All that I can do is to ask you to kneel down 
and pray with me, to Christ, that we may know what is 
his will in this matter.” ‘He immediately knelt down with 
me, and,” the written account continues, “my prayer was a 
reminding of the Lord Jesus Christ of his mercy to the 
sick, when he was on the earth, and that he never sent 
any sick away, unhealed. I then presented the petition 
of the father and mother, that their son might be healed, 
and besought the Lord to show what his will was in the 
case. Whilst I was making the supplication, it was re- 
vealed to me, through the Holy Spirit, that I was to lay 
hands on the boy, and receiving, at the time, great faith to 
do so, I arose and, not wishing to be observed by the fa- 
ther, I laid my hand on the lad’s head, and said in a low 
tone of voice—‘I lay my hand on thee in the name of 
Jesus Christ.’ In an instant I saw color rush into his 
pale cheeks, and it seemed as if a glow of health was giv- 
en, insomuch that I said involuntarily, ‘I think your son 
will recover.’ I then hastily left the room. In less than 

an hour, the mother came to my house and insisted on: 
seeing me, to tell me the wonderful things that had hap- 

pened to her son. The result was that the boy was about 

the next day.” 

The other cases narrated by him, are scarcely less re- 


™N OUR OWN TIMES. 483 


markable. At the same time, he admits, with character- 
istic ingenuousness, that no such gift has been vouchsafed 
him now, for a number of years, and that most of the ex- 
pectations he had in connection with the apostolic wonder, 
thus restored, have been disappointed. What God’s design 
was, in the gift thus temporarily bestowed, is a profound 
mystery to him, and he submits himself calmly in it to the 
better, though inscrutable wisdom of God. Probably 
enough, the reason of his gift was exhausted in affording, 
to these truths of faith, that oudlosee which is necessary 
to their just equilibrium, 

I have hesitated much whether to speak of a case that, 
in all its varied stages, has been under my own personal 
inspection, and I am decided by the consideration that, 
while it shows no healing, by a gift, it does show, only the 
more convincingly, a supernatural grace of healing entered 
into the faith of the subject herself. She is an intelligent, 
well-educated young woman, of a more than commonly 
strong and somewhat restive natural temperament, the 
daughter of a christian man, living in rather depressed cir 
cumstances, but profoundly respected for his character. 
Hleven years ago this daughter, who before had begun to 
show symptoms of disease, in a considerable distortion of the 
spine, became a great sufferer in the still worse complica- 
tions of a hip disease. I have never looked on such 
scenes of distress in any other case, and hope I may never 
witness such again. Several times she was given up by 
her physicians, and her death was expected daily; I 
should hardly tell the whole truth, if I did not say, longed 
for, even more constantly. After about two years, how: 
ever, her disease took a more quiet shape, and the suffer. 
ing was greatly diminished. ‘Thus she lay for nine long 


484 SUCH FACTS ARE. ABUNDANT 


years of helplessness, with both feet drawn up under her 
and one of them so close that it was difficult to get ina 
thickness of cloth under the knee, to preveat inflamma 
tion, The physicians agrecd that there was nothing 
more to be done, and that she must wait her time; which, 
after a while, she had learned to do, with the sweetest pa- 
tience and equanimity. Every impulse in her restive na- 
ture was now tamed “to God’s will, and she blessed the 
hand which was pressing her so close to the divine friend- 
ship. If inquired of, at any time, whether she would like 
to get well, she uniformly answered, ‘‘No;” adding that 
she was afraid she might not stand fast, but might turn 
away from her fidelity, in which she was now so pro- 
foundly peaceful and happy. 

But it occurred to her. finally that, if God could restore 
her, he might also keep her, and the question arose 
whether she ought not to trust Him. At last, she was 
beginning to think it might be her duty to believe in God’s 
healing as well as keeping, and in that, manner to pray. 
Having some attack of acute disease, a physician was 
called in, and, after the attack was quelled, he began to 
give some hopeful answers to her queries about the possi- 
bility of a restoration of her imbs. Shortly before this, © 
too, her father, who was visited with a great accumulation 
of trials, went through an awful struggle with God’s jus- 
tice, rising up against him in agonies of accusation. But 
he was quelled and comforted, and filled, as the result, 
with all divinest peace. And shortly after that, he had a 
dream, which presented his daughter as well, completely 
healed, before him. But it raised no expectation, either 
then or afterward, and he does not refer to it now as hay 
ing had any connection at all with the subsequent facts-— 


IN OUR OWN TINWES. 485 


he does not much confide in dreams. But his daughter 
was beginning now to believe that she might be made 
well, and really set herself to it as her settled faith; and 
he himself was allowing, often, the thought that possibly 
it might somehow be otherwise with her. Remedies were 
not discarded, but applied faithfully and perseveringly. 
The problem was, how to use natural causes with a 
faith in supernatural helps. In a short time the limbs 
were brought down, one of them to touch the floor, then 
both, then she stood, and next she walked. I knew the 
change that was going on, but, not having seen her for 
some wecks, I was none the less surprised, when walking 
in a neighboring street, to see her skipping down a high 
flight of steps, with scarcely a perceptible token of lame- 
ness. Ask her family now what this means, and by what 
power it has come to pass, and they answer promptly, 
“by the power of God.” She herself says the same, an- 
swering out of her own consciousness. She believes that 
her physician has done well, and that God sent him 10 be 
a minister to her faith, but she declares that she has all 
the while felt the vigor coming into her by and through 
her faith, and that, when she first stood, she consciously 
stood by a divine power, and could no more have stood 
without the sense of it, or the day before it came, than 
she could have supported the world. This protestution 
of hers I feel bound to honor; though very well aware 
that the case may be turned, by saying that the second 
causes appealed to wrought the cure. But is it not more 
philosophical, a great deal, to take the inward testimony 
of the subject, and see the higher censciousness of her 
faith struggling with the remedies, and contributing a 


force superior, in fact, to all remedies? Indeed, I have a 
41* 


486 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT 


peculiar sauisfaction in the facts of tlis case, just because 
the natural and supernatural are so rationally and soundly 
combined. ‘The problem of their possible concurrence is 
evenly held, and there is time enough occupied, in the 
cure, to show a process. ‘Go to the pool of Siloam, and 
wash ”—even Christ himself used nature as a means, te 
provoke the necessary faith, when nature had, in fact, no 
virtue in itself. | 

I cite only one more witness; a man who carries the 
manner and supports the office of a prophet, though with- 
out claiming the repute of it himself. He is a fugitive 
from slavery, whose name I had barely heard, but whose 
character and life have been known to many in our com- 
munity, for the last twenty years. He called at my door, 
about the time I was sketching the outline of this chapter, 
requesting an interview. As I entered the room, it was 
quite evident that he was struggling with a good deal of 
mental agitation, though hig manner was firm, and even 
dignified. He said immediately, that he had come to me 
‘with a message from de Lord.” I replied, that I was 
glad if he had any so good thing as that for me, and hoped 
he would deliver it faithfully. He told me, in terms of 
great delicacy, and with a seriousness that excluded all. 
appearance of a design to win his way by flattery, that he 
had conceived the greatest personal interest in. me, be- 
cause, in hearing me-once or twice, he had discovered 
that God was teaching me, and discovering Himself to me 
in a way that was specially hopeful; and that, for this 
very reason, he had been suffering the greatest personal 
burdens of feeling on my account. For more than a year 
he had been praying for me, and sometimes in. the night. 
because of his apprehension that I had made a false step, 


IN OUR OWN TIMKs. ; 487 


and been disobedient to the heavenly vision. During ali 
this time, he had been struggling also with the question, 
whether he might come and see me, and testify his con- 
cern for me? One must be a very poor christian, not to 
be deeply touched by such a discovery—one of the hum: 
blest of God’s children, a stranger, trembling and watch: 
ing for him, in his place of obscurity, and daring, only 
with the greatest difficulty, to come and disburden his 
heart. . 

I asked him to explain, and not to suffer any feeling of 
constraint. In a manner of the greatest deference possi- 
dle, and with a most singularly beautiful skill, he went 
on, gathering round his point, and keeping it all the while 
concealed, as he was nearing it, straightening up his tall, 
manly form, dropping out his Africanisms, rising in the 
port of his language, beaming with a look of intelligence 
and spiritual beauty, all in a manner to second his pro- 
phetic formulas—‘“The Lord said to me” thus and thus; 
“The Lord has sent me to say;” till I also, as I gazed 
upon him, was obliged internally to confess, “verily, 
Nathan the prophet has come again!” It was really a 
scene such as any painter might look a long time to find— 
such dignity in one so humble; expression so lofty, and 
yet so gentle and respectful; the air of a prophet so com- 
manding and positive, and yet in such divine authority, 
as to allow no sense of forwardness or presumption. 

It came out, finally, as the burden of the message, that 
on a certain occasion, and in reference to a certain public 
matter, | had undertaken that which could not but with- 
draw me from God’s teaching, and was certain to obscure 
the revelations otherwise ready and waiting to be made. 
“Yes,” I replied, “but there was nothing wrong in what 


488 SUCH FACTS ARE ABUNDANT 


I undertook to set forward. It brought no scandal on 
religion. It concerned, you will admit, the real beuefit 
of the public, in all future times.” “Ah, yes,” he an- 
swered, ‘it was well enough to be done, but it was not 
for you. God had other and better things for you. He 
was calling you to Himself, and it was yours to go with 
Him, not to be laboring in things more properly belong- 
ing to other men.” J had given him the plea, by which, 
drawing on my natural judgment, I had justified myself 
in going into the engagement in question. Indeed, to 
have had any scruple on this account, I have no aoubt, 
would be commonly considered, by intelligent persons, to be 
-even a weakness. And yet, I am obliged to confess to a 
strong, and even prevalent impression, that my humble 
brother was right. For the real stress of his message lay, 
not so much in the particular instance referred to, as im 
that more general infirmity or mistake, which the instance 
might be used to represent; viz., the tendency of every 
most earnest soul to be diverted from its aims, by things 
external. His spiritual perceptions were deep enough to 
lay hold of a general infirmity, which was only the more 
impressively corrected by a particular example, and, in 
chis manner, his piercing words of love were answered by 
the settled assent of my christian consciousness. 

I thanked him for his message, and even looked upon 
him with a kind of reverence as we parted. 1 found, on 
inquiry, that he was a man without blame, industrious, 
pure, a husband and father faithful to his office, and 
always in the same high key of christian living. But 
the people of his color, knowing him well, and having 
nothing to say against him, could yet offer no opinion at 
all concerning him. He was plainly enough a strange 


IN OUR OWN TIMES. 489 


being to them; they could make nothing of him. The 
most they could say was, that he is always the same. 

I have since visited him, in his little shop, and drawn 
out of him the story of his life. He became a Christian 
about the time of his arrival at manhood, and gives a very 
clear and beautiful account of his conversion. And the 
Lord, he says, told: him, at that time, that he should be 
free, soul and body. To which he answered, “Yea Lord, 
I know it.” A promise that was afterward fulfilled in a 
very strange and wonderful deliverance. I observed that, 
in the account he gave me, he was continually saying, in 
the manner of the prophets, ‘the Lord said,” and “the 
Lord commanded,” and “the Lord promised,” and I called 
his attention to the fact, asking—what do you mean 
by this? Do you hear words audibly spoken? “Oh 
no.” “What then? Do you think what appears to 
be said to you, and call that the saying of the 
Lord?” “Yes, I think it—but that is not all.” “How 
then do you know that it is any thing more than ——’s 
thought?” “Well, I know it, I feel it to be not from me, 
and I can tell you things that show it to be so;” reciting 
facts, which, if they are true, prove beyond a question 
the certainty of some illumination not of himself. “Why , 
then,” I asked, “does God teach you in this manner and 
not me? I feel a strong conviction, sometimes, that I am 
in the will, I know not how, and the directing counsel of 
God, but I could never say, as you do, ‘the Lord said 
thus to me.’” “Ah,” said he, “but you have the means— 
you can read as I can not, you have great learning. But 
[ am a poor, ignorant child, and God does with me just 
as he can.” Whatever may be thought of his revelations, 
none, J think, will deny him, in his reply, the credit of a 


490 AND STILL We ARE SLOW 


true philosophy. What can be worthier of G_d thun w 
be the guide of this faithful, and otherwise dejected man, 
making up for his privations of ignorance, by the fuller 
and more open vision of Himself? 

And yet I should leave a wrong impression, were 
T not to say, that this christian fugitive, this un- 
lettered body servant, now, of Christ, as once of his 
earthly master, is deep in the wisdom of the scriptures, 
quotes them continually with a remarkable eloquence 
and propriety, and with a degree of insight which 
many of the best educated preachers might envy. 
He also believes that God has healed the sick, in 
many instances, in immediate connection with his 
prayers, giving the names and particulars without 
seruple. 

Such now are the kinds of religious exercises and 
demonstrations that are still extant, even in our own time, 
in certain walks of society. In that humbler stratum of 
life, where*the conventionalities and carnal judgments of 
the world have less power, there are characters blooming 
in the holiest type of christian love and beauty, who talk, 
and pray, and, as they think, operate apostolically, as if 
God were all to them that he ever was to the church, in 
the days of her primitive grace. And it is much to know 
that, while the higher tiers of the wise and prudent are 
assuming, so confidently, the absolute discontinuance of 
all apostolic gifts, there are yet, in every age, great num- 
bers of godly souls, and especially in the lower ranges of 
life, to whom the conventionalities of opinion are nothing, 
and the walk with God every thing, who dare to claim an 
open state with Him; to pray with the same expectation, 
and to speak of faith in the same manner, as if they had 


TO BELIEVE WHAT IS CREDIBLE 491. 


lived in the apostolic times. And they are not the roisy, 
violent class, who delight in the bodily exercises that 
prefié little, mistaking the fumes of passion for the reve- 
lations of God, but they are, for the most part, such as 
walk in silence, and dwell in the shades of obscurity. 
And that man has lived to little purpose, who has not 
learned that what the great world pities, and its teachers 
disallow, even though mixed with tokens of weakness, is 
many times deepest in truth, and closest to the real sub- 
limities of life and religion. 


That I may not leave a wrong impression, or an 
impression that is not according to truth, I feel obliged 
_to add, in concluding this chapter, that I do not 
seem to be as positive and full in my faith on this 
subject as I ought to be, and as my arguments them- 
selves may seem to indicate. As regards the general 
truth that supernatural facts, such as healings, tongues, 
and other gifts may as well be manifested now as 
at any former time, and that there has never been a 
_ formal discontinuance, I am perfectly satisfied. I know 
no proof to the contrary that appears to me to have 
a straw’s weight. And yet, when I come to the ques- 
tion of being in such gifts, or of receiving into easy 
credit those who appear to be, I acknowledge that, 
for some reason, either because of some latent subjection 
to the conventionalities of philosuphy, or to the worse 
conventionalities of sin, belief does not follow, save in 
a somewhat faltering and equivocal way. Arguments 
for the possibility are good, but evidences for the fact do 
not correspond. But there is nothing peculiar in this; it 
is even so with many great questions of God and immor. 


492, SLOW TO BELIEVE. 


tality. The arguments are good and clear, but, for some 
reason, they do not make faith, and we are still surprised 
to find, in our practice, that we only doubtfully believe. 
To believe these supernatural things, in the form of par- 
ticular facts, is certainly difficult; and how conscious 
are we, a8 we set ourselves to the questions, of the 
weakness of our vacillations! Pardon us, Lord, that 
when we make so much of mere credibilities and ra- 
tionalities of opinion, we are yet so slow to believe, 
that what we have shown to be credible and rational, is 
actually coming to pass. 


CHAPTER XY. 
CONCLUSION STATED—USES AND RESULTS. 


THE course of argument proposed in this treatise is now 
completed. It only remains to state, as definitely as may 
be, how far it goes, or in what way and degree it estab- 
lishes the main point in issue; and also to gather up some 
of the remote and subordinate results that appear to be 
involved in it. : 

It was undertaken, mainly, to establish the credibility 
and historic fact of what is supernatural in the christian 
gospels. ‘The problem was, in fact, to frame an argument 
that, on one hand, will virtually settle the question of a 
mythical origin of the gospels, without going into a direct 
controversy on that footing, where the points made are too 
many and loose to allow any very decisive result; also to 
frame an argument that, avoiding, on the other, the issue 
of infallible inspiration, which involves insuperable diffi- 
culties in the statement, will yet virtually gain all that is 
sought for the christian revelation under that issue; viz, 
a genuine, comprehensive faith in its supernatural origin 
as a gift of God to man. 

The argument presented turns principally on two facts; 
viz., the fact that we act supernaturally ourselves, which 
God and other created spirits may as well do as we; and 
tlie fact of sin, which is both a fact of universal observa: 
tion and of universal consciousness. On the ground of 
these two facts, it has been shown, first, that nature is not 
the proper system of God, but only an inferior, subordin- 
ate, and merely Cea Dare and, in that sense, a part 


494 THE ARGUMENT ESTABLISHES 


complemental to the grand supernatural empire, in which 
the real system of God is centered; secondly, that what 1s 
commonly called nature is no such integer of order and 
harmony as is commonly assumed, but is, in fact, a condi- 
tion of unnature, being a scheme of causalities disordered 
_ by sin, and set on courses of retributive action that imply 
perpetual misdirection; so that, apart from a coeternal 
factor of supernatural redemption, what the naturalists 
regard as the real totality, or system of nature, 1s. not 
only become a whole that groaneth and_ travaileth 
in pain together, but must inevitably continue to groan, 
till relief and deliverance are brought, by some force su- 
pernatural that is equal to the occasion. 

A supernatural work of redemption becomes, in this 
view, a kind of intellectual necessity; because otherwise 
the integrity and real unity of counsel, in a proper frame 
of order, appear to be wanting. The strongest possible 
presumption is raised, in this manner, for just such a work 
as Christianity undertakes and declares to be undertaken— 
as it should be—from before the foundation of the world; 
a work that is no afterthought, but enters into the origin- 
al unity of the great scheme of existence itself. When 
Christ appears, therefore, we take up the record of his life, ° 
and show that he is not only a supernatural person, as all 
men are, but a supernatural person in the still higher de- 
gree of being also superhuman; that he has come into 
our world as not being of it, that his character can be no- 
wise classed with human characters; in short, that he is a 
living, self-evidencing miracle in his person. Then, that 
he should perform miracles, is scarcely less than a neces: 
sary consequence. We also show that Christianity, as a 
plan of supernatural grace, contains hidden marks of 


THE VERITY OF THE GOSPELS. 495 


verity, which only appear, when it is held up in a light to 
show them and which, as being latent in this manner, 
could not be of man. We have also shown that the world 
itself is governed in the interest of Christianity, and that 
supernatural facts are occurring now, or have never been 
finally discontinued. It may be too much to claim that 
we have unanswerably established the fact of miracles 
performed in our time—it is more exact to say, that we 
have shown the assumption of their non-performance, of 
which so much is made by many critics, to be groundless, 
and that their continuance, which may be asserted with 
sufficient reason, they can no way disprove. 

What now is the precise bearing of all this on the his- 
toric verity and the supernatural origin of the gospels, or 
of the christian revelation generally? As regards the 
matter of an exact verbal inspiration, nothing directly; 
that is a question waived, or kept out of sight; and yet 
the mind is brought to a landing place, where, without 
being perplexed by impossible definitions, and_ strained 
arguments in their behalf, it will acquiesce, as it were, 
naturally, in the fact of a general, undefined inspiration, 
having no longer any quarrel to maintain, because the 
conditions of quarrel are taken away. The question of 
inspired verity is not left, by our argument, in any such 
position, as when it is held that the moral ideas and spirit- 
ual truths only of the scriptures are infallibly given, and 
their historic matter left to be disposed of as it may; for 
the great, commanding, principal facts are shown to be 
historically true. If any debate is to be had, it must be 
regarding certain subordinate and particular facts, that are 
questioned, because of some specially suspicious indica- 
tions, that stumble belief, And little stress is likely to be 


496 THE ARGUMENT ESTABLISHES 


laid on these, because the working plan of Christianity, as 
a regenerative, supernatural grace, is now on foot as a ver- 
ity already established; so that the mind is set on a high- 
er plane of thought, than when it only admits a Christian. 
ity qualified, or about to be qualified, down to a mere doe: 
trine of nature and natural development, and is prepared, 
in that manner, to be stumbled by the smallest difficulties, 

The mythical origin of the gospels is, in this manner, 
refuted, without any particular notice of its proofs, by a 
process farther back and more summary. ‘l'o untwist, 
one by one, its perverse ingenuities, and wade through its 
mires of false learning, will be necessary to no one who 
has found a Christ among men, impossible to be classed 
with men; doing his miracles, and erecting, on the earth, 
his Pecan ana kingdom. Not even Dr. Strauss would 
ever have undertaken this kind of argument, if he had not 
first assumed the incredibility of any thing supernatural; in 
which assumption, after all, the main plausibility of his 
argument consists. 

It is very true that we have not proved the historic ver- 
ity of all the miracles. We have only shown that Christ 
was a miracle himself, in his own person, and performed 
miracles. Whether he performed this or that miracle, ex- 
actly as related, may yet be questioned. Some of the facts 
reported as miracles, looking only at the form of the lan- 
guage, may be otherwise explained; as, for example, the 
disturbing of the water by the angel in the pool of Be 
thesda; where it may have been the writer’s intention, 
only to give the current faith or impression of the time, 
If any one chooses to deny the cursing of the fig-tree, be- 
cause it was an act of ill-nature, he can take that low view 
of the transaction; only he is likely, when confronted with 


THE VERITY OF THE GOSPELS 497 


the suggestion that it was done, as an eloquent exhibition 
of the great moral truth, that God will blast every tree 
that bears no fruit—a truth which could not be as impress: 
ively taught in words—to feel the lowness and perversity 
of his construction too sensibly, to find much comfort in 
it, ‘The miraculous nativity of Jesus may be questioned, 
by any one who can see nothing in it but ar. extravagance 
shocking to reason, or a myth, in the semblance of narra 
tive, that displaces any supposition of historic verity in the 
fact. But, given the fact that an incarnation is wanted, that 
Christ is declared to be the Word incarnate, and shown, 
by his character, to have come into the world as not being 
of it, what more can be needed than to put the objector 
on the question, in what other manner, a real incarna- 
tion of the divine in the human could be accomplished, 
that should be as close to human feeling, and as strictly 
historic, in its introduction, as this of the miraculous na- 
tivity? And if the objector will but let his imagination 
rise to the real pitch of the subject, it will be strange, if 
he does not even begin to feel himself kindled, with Mary, 
in her song of triumph, and accept the whole history, as 
one transcendently beautiful and sublime. In the same 
manner, any one is at liberty still, as far as our argument 
is concerned, to speak of discrepancies between the gos- 
pels, or between the Acts of the Apostles and the Epis- 
tles, but now that Christ, and his miracles, and his super- 
natural kingdom, are seen standing forth, as facts already 
established, facts which can not be shaken by any mere 
discrepancies in the narrative, he is much more like 
ly to accept these apparent disagreements, in matters triv- 
ial, as confirmations of the christian truth, and use ante as 


commendations of it to our confidence, 
42% 


4.98 THE ARGUMENT ESTABLISHES 


But 1 may be objected, contrary to this, by some over: 
streiuous, or overpunctual believer, that our argument, 
which stops short of proving every thing, leaves a gate 
opened to every sort of looseness; that, as the issue is here 
qualified, a war begun on each particular fact will, finally 
cut off, in detail, all that seemed to be established in the 
general; so that nothing will, in fact, be left. I think oth- 
erwise. The difficulty never has been to establish this or 
that miracle, but to establish any miracle at all, or the 
credibility of any. One miracle proved, or the credibility 
of one, is virtually an end of all debate, for the back of 
skepticism is there broken. Besides, the argument we in- 
stitute puts the doubter in a new and advanced position. 
He has verified Christ, the grand, central wonder, the dis- 
order and fall of nature, the need of a supernatural grace 
and power, even to complete the intelligent unity of God’s 
plan, and, what is more, the fact that he himself exists ina 
heavenly, supernatural kingdom, where he meets, on every 
side, the manifested love and reconciling grace of God. 
The atmosphere of doubt and debate is already cleared. 
‘To break loose now, on some particular miracle, or ques- 
tion of fact, is impossible. Even if he gain his point, he 
is the loser; for he only mars the glory of a faith that is 
already established, and spots with blemish the religion 
that already has a right to his faith. He does not break 
Christianity down, he only makes it a faith less welcome . 
and clear. In such a position, he will naturally prefer 
to have the gospel of his faith strong as it may be; 
holding always a presumption against the suggestions 
of doubt, and allowing to all the minor points of diffi- 
culty, that favorable construction by which they will be 
cleared. 


THE VERITY OF THE GOSPELS. 49¢ 


On the whole, we seem to make out, by our argument, 
a vindication of the supernatural truth of the gospcls, 
that is not only sufficient, but practically complete, and, 
besides, one that has many advantages. We go into no 
debate about the canon, which is likely to issue in a man: 
ner that is not really convincing; we start no claim of 
verbal inspiration, such as takes away the confidence and 
establishes the rational disrespect of the skeptic, before 
the argument is begun; we sharpen no point of infalli- 
bility down, so as to prick and fasten each particular iota 
of the book, afterward to concede variations of copy, 
defects of style, mistakes in numerals, and as many other 
little discrepancies as we must. But we try to establish, 
by a process that is intelligént and worthy of respect, the 
historic outposts, Christ and his miracles, and with these, 
also, the grand working-plan of a supernatural grace and 
salvation. After this, the mind will gravitate, as of 
course, toward a general, inclusive, comprehensive faith, 
and we shall find no language that so fitly expresses our 
conviction, as to say—All scripture is given by inspira- 
tion of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction in righteousness. — 

Superficially viewed, there is a certain parallelism be- 
tween this argument for the supernatural in religion, and 
that of Mr. Parker and the naturalistic school generally 
against it, and it is possible that some will be perverse 
enough to accuse me of a similar treatment of revelation, 
I will never condescend to widen, purposely, or for rea> 
sons politic and prudential, the distance between me and 
another who has offended the christian public. But it 
may show the method of my argument more exactly, if J 
sketch a brief comparisou-—just as I have been referring 


500 HOW RELATED TO THE METHOD 


heretofore to Mr, Parker, to get light and shade for my 
subject, without raising any special controversy with him, 

Mr. Parker undertakes to frame a rational view of re- 
ligion, that sets it on the footing of nature. I have un- 
dertaken to frame a rational view of religion, that com- 
prehends nature and the supernatural, as coeternal factors 
in the universal system of God. | 

He maintains the complete universality of natural laws, 
and refuses to believe in a miracle, because it is a suspen- 
sion of the laws of nature. I believe, as firmly, in the 
universality of laws, but not of natural laws; maintain- 
Ing that the human will itself is regulated by no laws of 
natural causality, and has power even to act upon the 
lines of cause and effect in nature. God, of course, may 
do the same; which, if he do it, is a miracle. Nota mir- 
acle because the laws of nature are suspended; for they 
are not, but are only varied in their action by the inter 
vention of a power external, as when we vary their 
results ourselves. Yet still there is a law for the inter- 
vention of God, viz., the law of his end; which, though 
it be no term of nature, but a rule of intelligence and 
rational sovereignty, would require Him to perform the 
same miracle again, a thousand times over, in exactly ° 
the same conditions. To define a miracle, therefore, to 
be a suspension of the laws of nature, is irrational and 
wholly below the subject. With Mr. Parker, I believe 
in no such miracle. And yet, in the result of this argu: 
ment, Tam brought to accept all the miracles of Christ, 
while he rejects them all. 

Mr. Parker takes up the admission, so frequently and 
gratuitously made, that miracles and all supernatural oifts 
have been discontinued, and are now no longer credible, 


OF NATURALISM. 50] 


and presses the inference that, being now incredible, they 
never were any less so; that pushing them back, in time, 
is only a trick to get their incredibility so far off that we 
shall not feel it, and that the only ingenuous conclusion is 
tat, not occurring now, they never did occur. It is cer. 
tainly a very remarkable turn, as I think any one must 
adinit, that supernatural facts, being credible down to 
some certain year of the world’s almanac, then begin to 
be incredible; incredible in their very nature, so that any 
one who pretends to believe in them is, of course, to be 
set down as an enthusiast, or a charlatan. Mr. Parker 
takes the assumption tendered, and reasons from it. I 
reject the assumption, and his inferences with it. 

Mr. Parker has much to say of inspiration. He be- 
lieves that every man will be inspired under fixed laws 
of nature, just according to his goodness. In maintaining 
that all God’s supernatural works, which include inspira- 
tions, of course, are ordered by fixed laws, I may seem to 
coincide. But the fixed laws of intelligence or counsel, 
the laws of reason as related to his end, are a very differ- 
ent matter from the fixed laws. of causality in nature. 
Besides, if we look at the question with christian eyes, 
there appears to be a little inversion of method in the 
doctrine that, if men will be good, they shall be rewarded 
by a consequent inspiration. It would be as much more 
rational, as it is more christian, to put the inspiration in 
advance of the goodness, and say that men will be good 
accordingly as God inspires them. Not even this will 
hold, however, for God no doubt exerts an inspiring force 
in men, to make them good, which they may even fatally 
obstruct by their perversity. The trve doctrine of inspi- 
ration can not be stated in any such semmary manner, 


502 HOW RELATED TO THE METHOD 


All inspirations are acts of divine sovereignty, under laws 
of reason which regulate that sovereiguty. And then 
there are two modes of inspiration, one that is concerned 
to re-establish the normal state of being, or the state cf 
divine consciousness, in which the soul, as a free spirit, 
comes to abide and live in the divine movement, and is 
kept, strengthened, guided, exalted, by the inward revela- 
tion of God; where it may be truly said that the soul is 
inspired, accordingly as it yields itself conformably to 
God’s will, and trustfully to the Inspiring grace. The 
other mode of inspiration may be called the inspiration 
of use; where the doctrine is, that God inspires men, ac: 
cording to the use he will make of them. And here the 
kinds, or qualities, are as many as the uses. He inspires 
the shepherd, Amos, not to write Isaiah’s prophecy, but 
the prophecy of Amos. He inspires Bezaleel to devise 
cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in 
brass, and in cutting of stones, and Moses to be the leader 
and lawgiver of his people. He will give the same man 
a variable inspiration, setting Paul, for example, in one 
mood of power, when he lays hig scorching rebuke on the 
head of the Corinthians, and in a very different, when he 
chants, in the fifteenth chapter, his sublime lyric on the 
resurrection. It is doubtless true, also, that, as God has a 
place and a use for every man, so he has an inspiration 
for him; adding honor thus, and comfort, and capacity, 
to every employment. The degree also of this inspira- 
tion may be supposed to have some fixed relation to the 
faith and faithfulness of the subject: though it is difficult 
to say what we mean by degrees, where the kinds are and _ 
must be different. The doctrine of Mr. Parker wholly | 
ignores or disallows this inspiration of use, and recognizes 


OF NATURALISM. 503 


nothing but the inspiration of character. If a prophet. 
therefore, writes a book of scripture, with a higher inspi- 
ration than another man has, who writes nothing, it is 
because he isa better man. Let all men be good then, 
and all will be able to write as good books as he. A 
very convenient and short way of letting down the honors 
of scripture; but it may be that God wants only a few men 
for this particular use, or to write books of scripture; as 
he wanted only one to be a Moses, and one.to be a Bezaleel. 
And if this be so, it is very certain that he will inspire as 
many as he wants, for the uses wanted, and no more. It 
may be that, as he never wants another Moses, so he never 
wants another book of scripture written, and it may be 
that he does. Should he ever want another, he will be 
able to qualify his man; if not, no other will be quali- 
fied. Meantime, it must be enough that he will have his 
own counsel, and will aid and qualify all men for the uses 
he appoints. On this ground, it is no such offense to rea- 
son, to suppose that God has inspired particular men to 
have a part in the written revelation of his will, as Mr. 
Parker thinks it to be, and the air of confidence he as- 
sumes, when setting forth the conditions, under which all 
- men may have as good or the same inspiration as the wri- 
ters of scripture, indicates rather a want of due considera- 
tion, than a philosophic superiority. God conducts things 
to their uses by laws of causality; spirits to their uses, by 
inspirations; and, as the different kinds of things, ponder- 
able and imponderable, solid and fluid, elastic and inelas- 
tic, organic and inorganic, are kept to their uses by differ- 
ent kinds of laws, so it is but rational to believe that God 
will prepare men to their different places and uses, by dif 
ferent kinds of inspiration. 


5O4 HOW RELATED TO THE METHOD 


I make no apology, then, for any look of parallelism 
that may be observed, between the shaping of my argu 
ment and that of Mr. Parker. On the contrary, I prefer 
to recognize the fact, thus far indicated, that he is pressed 
by the real difficulties of the question, and conceives intel- 
ligently many of the points that must appear, in any gen- 
uinely intellectual solution. It has sometimes seemed to 
me that, with all his aversion to supernaturalisin, he 
might as well be satisfied with the general solution I have 
given, upon the footing of supernaturalism, as with his 
own upon the footing of nature. Had he sufficiently 
weighed certain questions that are fundamental, but 
which he virtually ignores; had he determined what is 
the exact definition of the supernatural, as related to na- 
ture, and, in that manner, come upon the fact that we act 
supernaturally ourselves; had he also brought his mind 
closely enough to the great question of sin, to expel all 
ambiguity concerning it—holding the fact of sin as posi- 
tively, in the field of criticism, as he does when he attacks 
slavery as a reformer, and tracing that fact to its legiti- 
mate results—I see not how he could have escaped a differ- 
ent conclusion. Instead of making nature the kingdom 
of God, he would have made it the instrument only, or 
mere field of the kingdom; a theater in which the powers 
of the kingdom have their parts. Instead of looking for 
inspiration by the laws of nature, which, if the word hag 
any meaning deeper than semblance, is even absurd, he 
would have seen it to be a fact supernatural. He would 
have found a place for prayer, better than a dumb-bell 
exercise before the terms of natural causality and conse 
quence. His remorseless fidelity to a mistaken argument 
would not have comvelled him to rob the christian sevip- 


OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. 505 


tures of their glorious distinction, as a revelation of God. 
He would not have been obliged to spot the divine beauty 
of Christ, to reduce him to his own human level, or to 
shock his own better sense and that of the world, by giv- 
ing out the expectation that other and better Christs will 
yet be developed, by the progress of his sinful race. 
Faith he would have discovered, as the sister of reason; 
grace, as the medicine of nature. In a word, he would 
have been a christian in his doctrine, which now he is 
not; for, if there be any sufficient, infallible, and always 
applicable distinction, that separates a christian from one 
who is not, it is the faith, practically held, of a supernat- 
ural grace or religion. There is no vestige of christian 
life in the working-plan of nature. Christianity exists 
only to have a remedial action upon the contents and con- 
ditions of nature. That is development; this is regenera- 
tion. No one fatally departs from Christianity, who rests 
the struggles of holy character on help supernatural from 
God. No one really is in it, however plausible the sem- 
blance of his approach to it, who rests in the terms of 
morality, or seli-culture, or self-magnetizing practice. 


Tf the argument we have traced should be found to have 
established a solid conviction of truth, in the supernatural 
facts and powers of Christianity, it will go far to invert 
the relative opinion of nature and faith in all christian be- 
lievers, and must therefore work important changes in many 
things pertaining to the interests of the christian truth. It 
must vary the estimate, for example, that is currently held 
of natural theology. It is even a principal distinction of 
our modern Christianity, that it has submitted itself, so 


implicitly, to the dominating ideas and fashions of the new 
43 


506 HOW RELATED TO THE METHOD 


religion, science, or supposed science, that passes by this 
name, It is a kind of revised Christianity, a gospel that 
ig preached in the method, set up in the plane, satu- 
rated with the spirit, and even, where it is not suspect- 
ed, compounded of the matter, of the science. The 
christian schools begih with natural theology, because it 
is conceived to be fundamental, and the young men 
are long in disabusing themselves of their mistake; for 
any thing which can be proved for religion out of nature, 
and in the field of natural reason, 1s conceived to be spe 
cially solid, and impossible to be doubted longer. <All 
which I call a mistake, however, not because of any 
positive mischief in deductions of this kind. The evil 
suffered is due, not so much to what our natural theology 
does, as to what it requires to be left undone; or, to be 
more explicit, to the fact that it requires all supernatural 
evidences to give way to it, as being themselves a more 
questionable kind of verity; even as the ill-favored and 
lean kine of Pharaoh’s dream devoured those which were 
better. The opposite pole is represented here by Dr. 
Henry More, who builds his argument for the existence of 
God, to a considerable degree, on the basis of supernatural] 
facts; such as dreams, prophecies, premonitions, visions, 
revelations, and the like—a curious and striking evidence, 
when viewed in contrast with our present conceptions, of 
the change of mental position that may be wrought in the 
thinking world, in a comparatively brief space of time, 
The modern advances in science compelled the change, 
and it could not be resisted. Neither was it desirable that 
it should be; for, when the new theology of nature is onea 
qualified, by restoring the other pole of the subject, which _ 
velongs more distinctly to Christianity, it will be found to. 7 


+ 
| 
uf 


) 


OF NATURAL THEOLOGY. 507 


have expelled multitudes of superstitious and unillumin- 
ated vagaries, necessary to be expelled, before it was pos- 
sible to hold the supernatural evidences, in the manner of ~ 
true intelligence necessary to their genuine effect. Then 
the two worlds of evidences are seen to be complementary 
to each other, and the argument for God, the christian 
God, is complete as never before. 

The evil in our present stage of thought, is that nat- 
ural theology has the whole ground to-itself, and the God 
established, is not a being who meets the conditions of 
Christianity at all. We get, of course, no proofs out of 
nature, that go farther than to prove a God of nature, least 
of all do we get any that show him to be acting super- 
naturally, to restore the disorders of nature. What we 
discover is a God, who institutes, is revealed by, and, as 
many will suspect, zs the causes of nature. A latent pan- 
theism lurks in the argument. Calling the God we prove 
a personal being, and meaning it in good faith, we yet 
find ourselves living before causes, and looking for couse- 
quences. We only half believe in prayer. We expect 
to be delivered of sin, by a long course of duty and self 
reformation, that will finally pacify the offended laws of 
nature, and bring them on our side again. That God will 
do any thing for us Himself, or hold any terms of real 
society with us, we but faintly believe. That used to 
be the opinion of ancient times, but the world, we 
imagine, is now growing more philosophical. The result 
is that, professing Chr’stianity, in the most orthodox man- 
ner, we live, in natural theology, half way on the road to 
pantheism. Even the incarnation and the miracles of 
Jesus drop into a virtually dead faith, becoming forms, 
in place of living and life-giving realities. 


508 HOW RELATED TO 


And the reason is, that our God, derived from nature, 
is a monosyllable only, or at best a mechanical first cause, 
and no such being as the soul wants, or, as Christian- 
ity supposes, in its doctrines of regenerated life, and in 
all its supernatural machineries, Resting here, there- 
fore, or allowing ourselves to be retained by what we 
call our natural theology, Christianity dies out on our 
hands, for the want of a christian God. And, according: 
ly, it is a remarkable fact, even of history, that we have 
lost faith in God, just in proportion to the industry we 
have spent in proving his existence, by the natural evi- 
dences. First, because the God we prove does not meet 
our living wants, being only a name for causes, or a 
God of causes; secondly, because, in turning to Christian- 
ity for help, we have rather to turn away from the God 
we have proved, than toward Him. We may seem to 
have established the fact of God’s existence, but if God is 
gained, Christianity is lost! 

There is no relief to this mischief, but to conceive, at 
the beginning, that nature is but a fraction of the com- 
plete system of God, and no integer; that the true, living 
God, beautifully expressed in a small way in nature, is a 
vastly superior being still, who holds the worlds of nature 
in his hands, and acts upon them as the Rectifier, Redeem- 
er, Regenerator, and is even more visibly, convincingly, 
and gloriously expressed in Christianity than he is in the 
worlds. Show Him at the head of the great kingdom 
of minds, compassionate to sin, conversant with sinners, 
_ a hearer of prayer, an illuminator of experience, a deliverer 
from the retributions of nature, the glorious new-creator 
of all the most glorious characters in the world, Display 
the self-evidencing tokens of his feeling and work, as the - 


THE POSITIVE INSTITUTIONS. 509 


God supernatural—God in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto himself. There is more convincing evidence for 
God, in the life and passion of Jesus, than in all the me- 
chanical adaptations of the worlds. The God of the Bible 
and the Church, the God that rules the world in the inter- 
est of Christ and salvation, manifested in the divine 
beauty, and the mighty works and heroic sufferings of 
his saints—this is the God that speaks to our true wants 
Provoke such wants, and let him speak. This kind of 
evidence restores the equilibrium of the mere natural evi: 
dences, makes the God established a person, the true 
living God, and the supernatural facts of Christianity are 
sustained and not discredited by our belief in Him. 

It does not appear to be suspected that our modern 
tendencies to pantheism are at all related te our over- 
doing in the matter of natural theology, but it will by 
and by be discovered, that we were greatly imposed 
upon by our zeal, and took our ingenuity, in this kind of 
proof-building, for a good deal more than it was worth. 
Never is God conceived to be really personal, till he is 
shown outside of nature, acting upon nature, even as we 
do ourselves. The proofs we seek are genuine, only when 
they correspond, and show us-what wants to be shown. 


It is also a matter of consequence in our argument, 
as related to the wants of the age, that it provides a place 
for the positive institutions of religion, and prepares a 
rational basis for their authority. It is frequently re- 
marked that, for some reason, these positive institutions 
are falling rapidly into disrespect, as if destined finally to 
be quite lost, or sunk in oblivion. Various reasons are 


assigned for this fact, which amount to nothing moré defi- 
43* 


510 HOW RELATED TO 


nite, than that such is the spirit of the times. The true 
reason is the growth and pervading influence of natural 
ism, which not only does not want, but excludes such in- 
stitutions. This doctrine assumed, they are theoretically 
impossible. As the word institution itself indieates, they 
are Supernatural creations; that is, something set wp on the 
world of nature, not developments out of nature. Be- 
sides, it is the manner and temper of naturalism, to be 
impatient of any thing, not established in terms of natural 
reason, and spurn it as having no sufficient authority. 
Accordingly it will be seen, that, as we grow more 
naturalistic, just in the same proportion do these institu- 
tions lose their hold of us. What have we to do with 
the church—can we not be as good christians out of 
the church as in it? What signify the sacraments, even 
if they were distinctly appointed by Christ? they can nut 
save us, and we can well enough be saved without them. 
And what is a holy day but a needless restriction, when 
one time ought to be as holy as another? So too of the 
Bible; that, as related to nature, 1S a positive institution. 
And so again of Christianity itself, which began to be in- 
stituted in the ancient ritual, and was finished, or fully 
completed, when the higher sense of that ritual was dis- 
played, in the terms of the christian salvation, It was set 
up on the world, by a God who is not imprisoned in it, 
but is acting on it from without, to rescue it from the ac- 
tion of its disordered causalities. What are all these pre- 
tended institutions of God, but incumbrances and en- 
croachments on our liberty? And what necessary use du 
they serve? They are, I answer, what body is to soul, 
All vital or vitalizing powers are organific, and live by 
means of their embodiment. These institutions are the 


THE POSITIVE INSTITUTIONS. lh 


body of religious organization, the conditions, in that 
manner, of religious power and perpetuity. Cast away 
this body, and religion is a disembodied ghost only, 
flitting across the world, but never resting in it. Truth 
bacomes a vagrant. Worship has no time or seat. 
Preachers have no @alling or comnssion. And the no- 
church, no-observance people, come into the world te 
merely wear out and die, without faith, without holy vir- 
tue, without ‘great sentiments to conserve society, or ilu- 
minate the night of their virtual atheism. If we talk of 
an “ Absolute Religion,” that is going to abide and reign 
without institutions, it will reign as Absolute Vacuity. 
However eloquently preached, for the time, and however 
promising the show it makes, by works of reform and 
social philanthropy, it will be seen to organize nothing, 
and, when once its aim is accomplished in the extinction 
of all that Christianity organizes, it will simply cease ta 
work, as all poison does, when the subject is dead. 

That Christianity will utterly die, however, for this or 
any other cause, we are not to believe. But the tendency 
of our time is one that must be finally arrested, by one or 
the other of these two methods: by restoring a distinct 
and properly intelligent faith in the supernatural reign of 
Christ, such as I have here undertaken to set forth, or else 
by a blind recoil, such as mere vacuity and the pains of 
vagrancy will instigate. In the first and true method, we 
shall have the positive institutions, holding them in re: 
spect, and observing them in practice, because we conceive 
a God who is not waiting for the development of nature, 
but working to regenerate nature, by what he can erect 
upon it and do init. But if religion gets no body and no 
organized state, by this rational and true method, then it 


, 


512 HOW RELATED TO 


will have them by a worse; for, when we have gone 
loose for a long time, in this kind of dissipation, and 
- seattered the body of religion as fine dust on the winds, 
there will finally come a reaction, a painful want of forms, 
observances, and organizations, and a greedy, irrational 
hurrying back to the church that offers such a bountiful 
supply. The Absolute Religion that excludes a church, 
will conduct us back to the Absolute Church, and there, 
as disappointed victims of one, we shall go in, to be 
busied and fooled by observances and sacraments of the 
other, losing out our intelligence, and even God’s heght 
itself, under an immense overgrowth of institutions which 
He did not appoint, and which have really no agreement 
with His truth. 


The conception we have raised of Christianity, as a 
regenerative work and institution of God, separates it, by 
_ a wide chasm, from any mere scheme of philanthropy or 
social reform. As to reforms that begin at the out- 
side, and stop at the rectification of the outward conduct, 
they may be beneficial or they may not. There is a de- 
gree of vice, and consequent misery, that, for the time, 
incapacitates the subject for the reception of truth and 
the christian influences. There are also external wrongs 
and disorders of sin, that only represent to men the 
inward state of their hearts; holding up the glass in 
which they may see themselves; and it is no genuine in- | 
terest of Christianity to get these smoothed away. It is 
even a great part of God’s wisdom, in casting the plan of 
our life, that he has set us in conditions to bring aut the 
evil that isin us. For it is by this medley, that we make, 
of wrongs, fears, pains of the mind, and pains of the 


MATTERS OF SOCIAL REFORM, - HLS 


- body, all the woes of all shapes and sizes that follow at 
the heels of our sin—by these it is that he dislodges our 
perversity, and draws us to Himself. If, therefore, by a 
grand comprehensive sweep of reform, we could get all 
the misdoings, that we call sins, outof sight, and the sin 
of the spirit, as a state separated from the consciousness 
cf God, shut im, so as nowhere to appear, it would be 
the greatest imaginable misfortune. We should have a 
race acting paradisaically in their behavior, when they 
have no principle of good in their life. It 1s very true that 
no mere reform is likely to reach this point; for it is very 
certain that men will do sins enough, or have vices 
enough to represent and shame their sin. And yet the 
merely naturalistic reformers go to just this task; the 
task, that is, of an external purgation of the world. This 
is their religion, and they take on often such airs, in 
what they imagine to be the superior philanthropy, 
or the superior fidelity and boldness of their course, 
that they seem even to be holding out a challenge 
to Christianity to come and try, if it can do as much 
as they! Are they not going to take care of the 
progress of society? Are they not also going finally 
to get all the evils of life away? Christianity under- 
takes no such thing—unless by undertaking more. It 
goes only a certain way in the matter of reforms; viz., 
far enough to show its true interest in every thing hu- 
man, and especially far enough to get those vices and 
sins in hospital, which, as they continue to rage, take 
away self-possession, abate the force of reason, and dis- 
qualify the subject for the gospel. But it has a quiet per 
ception of the folly and absurdity of any plan, which ex- 
pects to smooth up the world in its sin, or its alienation 


514 HOW RELATED TO 


from God. Back of sins, it recogvizes sin; back of the 
acts, a state which they express and represent. This 
it regenerates; and so, working outward from the inmost 
center, it proposes to reform every thing. 

Great reforms are certainly wanted. No christian there- 
fore will dishonor the faith of a supernatural remedy in 
Christ, by taking refuge behind it, and avoiding, in that 
manner, his responsibilities—how is he going to regenerate 
all the sin of the world, when he dare not speak of the sins? 
On the other hand, he will not be intimidated by the outcry 
of the reformers, that upbraid his christian slowness, or 
beguiled by their pretentious airs, when they.make it a 
religion, or even a more superlative religion, to be domg 
such prodigious things for society. Their appeal is to 
public opinion, not to God. They make their own 
gospel as they go, and have undertaken, themselves, to 
do such things for the world, that men will say, “behold 
Christianity was a failure!” The force too by which 
they operate is in their will, and this strikes fire into the 
nitrous element of their passions, the moment they en- 
counter resistance. ‘They grow hot and violent. Denun- 


ciation becomes their element, and, as numbers are added, 


they run to a genuine fanaticism. No christian has any 
place on this level. As far as he undertakes to co-operate 
_in reforms, he must do it as one who stays above with 
Christ, and works with him; retaining his passions, by 
not loosing his will; mixing his reproofs with his prayers, 
and moderating his ambition by resting his cause, in the 
mighty power of God. 


To admit, in its full force, the reality of our christian, 
or supernatural relations to God, would also very certainly 


THE MANNER OF PREACHING. 515 


result in a more apostolic manner of preaching. For 
preaching deals appropriately in the supernatural, pub- 
lishing to guilty souls what has come into the world from 
above the world—Christ and his salvation. We ask, how 
often, with real sadness, whence the remarkable impotcace 
of preaching in our time? It 1s because we concoct our 
gospels too much in the laboratories of our understand- 
ing; because we preach too many disquisitions, and look for 
effects correspondent.only with the natural forces exerted. 
True preaching is a testimony; it offers, not things rea- 
soned, in any principal-degree, but things given, supernat- 
ural things, testifying them as being in their power, by an 
utterance which they fill and inspire. It brings new preml- 
ses, which, of course, no argument can create, and, therefore, 
speaks to faith. And, what 1s most of all peculiar, it as: 
sumes the fact, in men, of a religious nature, higher than 
a merely thinking nature, which, if it can be duly awak- 
ened, cleaves to Christ and his salvation with an almost 
irresistible affinity. This religious nature is a capacity for 
the supernatural; that is, for the divinely supernatural ; in 
other words, it is that quality by which we become inspir- 
able creatures, permeable by God’s life, as a crystal by the 
light, permeable in a sense that no other creature is. In- 
deed, the great problem of the gospel is, In one view, to 
inspire us again, at a point where we are uninspired; to 
permeate us again by the divine nature, and make us con- 
scious again of God. In this view, 1t assumes to speak as 
to a want, and what.a want it is, that a,capacity even for 
God, in the soul, stands empty! And hence it is that so 
many infidels have been converted under preaching, that 
went directly by their doubts, only bringing up the mighty 
themes of God and salvation, and throwing them in as 


516 HOW RELATED TO 


torches into tlie dark, blank cavern of their empty heart. 
They are not put upon their reason, but the burning glow 
of their inborn affinities for the divine are kindled, and 
the blaze of these overtops their speculations, and scorches 
them down by its glare. Doubtless there are times and 
occasions, where something may be gained by raising a 
trial before the understanding. But tiere may also be 
something lost, even in cases where that kind of issue is 
fairly gained. Many a time nothing is wanting, but to 
speak as toa soul already hungry and thirsty; or, if not 
consciously so, ready to hunger and thirst, as soon as the 
bread and water of life are presented. If the problem is 
to get souls under sin inspired again, which it certainly 
is, then it is required that the preacher shall drop lectur- 
ing on religion and preach it; testify it, prophesy it, speak 
to faith as being in faith, bring inspiration as being in 
spired, and so become the vehicle, in his own person, 
of the power he will communicate; that he may truly be- 
get in the gospel such as will be saved by it. No man is 
u preacher, because he has something like or about a gos- 
pel, in his head. He really preaches only when his persov 
is the living embodiment, the inspired organ of the gOs- 
pel; in that manner no mere human power, but the 
demonstration of a christly and divine power. Jt is in 
this manner that preaching has had, in former times, ¢f- 
fects so remarkable. At present, we are almost all under 
the power, more or less, of the age in which we live. In. 
fected with naturalism ourselves and having hearers that 
are so, we can hardly find what account tc make of our 
_barrenness, 


It is also a matter of consequence to be anticipated, in a 


INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY. & ]? 


just and full establishment of supernatural vorities, that 
intellectual and moral philosophy are destined, in this 
way, to be final'y christianized; and so, that all science 
will, at last, be melted into unity with the religion ol 
Christ. Our professors of philosophy leave it to the the- 
ologians to settle the question whether man is a sinner or 
not, and go on to assume that he is in the normal state of 
his being, acting precisely according to his nature; when, 
if the theologians chance to doubt any of their conclu- 
sions, the reply is, that they do not understand philosophy. 

Now it is either true that man is a sinner, or it is not. 
If he is not asinner, then he exists normally, and what he is 
in his action, he is in his nature, and a great many questions 
“will be settled accordingly. On the other hand, if he is a 
sinner, acting against God, acting as he was not made to 
act, then he is, by the supposition, a disordered nature, a 
being in the state of unnature. Any philosophy therefore 
which does not recognize the fact, but deduces his nature 
from his present demonstrations, must be wholly at 
fault. 

And how different any philosophy of man must be, 
which ignores the fact of sin, from one that does not, may 
be easily seen. Let the subject be the relation of our 
powers and capacities to our ideals. One who makes no 
account of sin, will say, develop the capacities and you 
have the ideals—he will even infer the capacities from the 
ideals. But to one who duly recognizes sin, there is 
nothing so sad, as the fact that the mind flowers into 
ideals that it can not reach, conceiving a beauty, a per- 
fectly crystalline order, when it can as little drag itself 
into this beauty, this crystallire order, as it could a shat 


tered firmament. 
44 


518 - HOW RELATED TO 


Or, let tue subject be, what is the nature of virtue, or, 
more particularly, whether self-love is the determining 
motive in all virtue? Taking it for granted that, what 
men do they are made to do, and finding that the 
common world of men are actuated by self-love in their 
virtue, the inference is that such is the manner of all yir- 
tue; it is what men do for fear, for gain, or for some mat- 
ter of mere self-interest; in which virtue and vice are ex- 
actly alike. But one who recognizes the fact of sin, 
immediately suspects that the self-love power enters into 
men’s virtue, thus largely, because they are sinners. In 
the highest, the truly divine virtue, he looks for a sponta- 
neous or inspired movement, where the good is followed 
because it is good, the right because it is right, God be- 
cause He is God. And the conclusion is, that what the 
other calls virtue, is only a form of sin. 

Or again, the question may be, what is the perfect state . 
of man? Ignoring the fact of sin, the conclusion will be 
that he is perfected, in squaring himself by the rules 
of virtue; he is consummated, that is, in the matter of 
ethics. But where sin is taken into account, it will be 
recollected that men, as commonly observed, are out of 
place and out of the true line of experience; that they 
have departed from God, and that their properly religious 
nature is detained by sin, or closed up. ‘'T’o be completely 
filled with God and perfected in the eternal movement of 
God, in a word, to be conscious of God, and dwell in the 
divine impulse, or inspiration—that is the perfect state. 
_ He has found, in other words, that man is just what he 
most entirely omitted to be, or perhaps never once — 
thought of in his fallen life, an inspirable creature, hay- 
ing, in that fact, the real summit, the grandeur, and glory 


INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 519 


of his being. He culminates in God, not in any rules of 
ethics. His goodness is not the perfect drill he submits 
to, and tries to observe, but it is the freedom of a sponta: 
neous, inspired, and truly divine beauty. 

How different a thing must it be, to philosophize about 
a substance that acts according to its nature, and about . 
one that acts in contradiction both of its nature and its 
God! Doubtless the latter is a much higher form of 
being than the other; for it can not be a thing, it can 
be nothing less than a power, glorious and transcendent; 
and therefore it is that man, contemplated at just this 
point of sin, rises to a pitch of tragic sublimity and 
grandeur, as nowhere else. Why then should our philos- 
ophy refuse to look at him, just where his real stature 1s 
revealed? When this fact of sin is referred back to the- 
ologians, and declared, either with or without a sneer, to 
be in their province, a much greater compliment is paid 
them than is commonly thought. It is giving them up 
all that belongs to man’s real greatness, and claiming the 
husk that is left. 

This separation of intellectual and moral philosophy 
from the great religious problem of our existence, the 
fact of sin, and the want of salvation, is the more remark- 
able, that it is a descent from the more dignified and no- 
bler conceptions of the ancient heathen masters. It is A 
unnatural, and even unintelligent. How can philosophy, 
dealing with a supernatural subject, stand off from the 
facts of his supernatural history? Endeavoring to stay 
by nature, and magnify the natural history, it only takes 
a brick for Babylon, and gives a science of the brick. 
There is to be a speedy revision of this false method. No | 
real philosopher can long ignore the supernatural. Re- t 


520 HOW RELATED TO 


ligion then takes held of philosophy, and scts it to the 
study of her problems, Ali natural science will follow, 
sctting itself in affinity with things supernatural. ‘The 
_/ philosophies are then baptized, in being simply inducted 
‘ into a just conception of the one system of God. Now 
the young minds trained in such studies are not led 
away, but led directly up to Christ and the glorious truth 
of his mission. That mission is become the pole star of 
learning, and how great the change that must follow! 


Once more it appears to be an important consequence 
of the argument we have instituted, that, in assigning the 
Supernatural a definite place, and a firm, intellectual 
ground, it contributes a valuable aid to christian experl- 
ence. There is a feeling widely prevalent that when we 
talk of faith, we are covering up the want of intel] igence ; 
that when we speak of the supernatural, we mean some: 
thing ghostly, supplied by the imagination, and verified 
only by our superstitions; that when we name the matter 
of religious experience, we suppose a driveling, and, as it 
were, forced submission of the soul, to what a rational 
philosophy must of course reject. All such impressions 
will, I trust, be removed, as unworthy and really unjust, 
by the argument I have now presented. 

It finds a place for the supernatural in the scheme of 
existence itself; showing that we ourselves are supernat- 
ural agents as really, only not in the same degree of pow- 
er, as Christ in his miracles. It gets a footing, in this 
manner, for supernatural facts and agencies, among the 
known realities. More than this, it shows that nature is 
not, by itself, any complete whole or real universe, but is 
in fact only a scaffolding, the smallest, humblest part of 


CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. | 521 


the intellectual whole, or system of God’s empire; while, 
on the other, hand, the supernatural side of his plan, con- 
cerned with free intelligences, their government and re- 
aemption, and the building of them into a temple of eter. 
nal Love and Beauty round himself comprises all the real 
and last ends of his throne. 

Kvery thing is thus made ready for the best advances in 
reugious experience. For there is a close relation, scarcely 
different from identity, between faith and what is called 
experience; and both are terms that have a fixed refer- 
ence to the fact, that Christ and Christianity are supernat- 
ural bestowments. If they could be reasoned out of 
premises already in the mind, they would not require 
faith. But Christ comes into the world from without, to 
bestow himself by a presentation. He is a new premise, 
that could not be reasoned, but must first be, and then 
can be received only by faith. When he is so received, or 
appropriated, he is, of course, experienced or known by ex- 
periment; in that manner verified—he that believeth hath 
the witness in himself. The manner, therefore, of this di- 
vine experience, called faith, is strictly Baconian. And the 
result is an experimental knowledge of God, or an experi- 
mental acquaintance with God, in the reception of his su- 
pernatural communications. Which knowledge, again, or 
acquaintance, is, in fact, a revelation ‘within, a divine 
manifestation, a restored consciousness of God ; or we may 
call it peace, joy, strength, a growth into the divine purity 
~-it is any and all these together. And it should not be 
strange that, in such a participation of God, we are lifted, 
empowered, assimilated, or finally glorified. 

It will be admitted that what is properly called religious 


experience runs Icw in our time. Lven the phrase itself 
44* 


522 HOW RELATED TO 


is carefully eschewed, by many, as a term of cant, that 
lacks, or is suspected of lacking, any basis of intelligence. 
We learn to be familiar with the phrase “philosophic con- 
sciousness,’ and speak with satisfaction of ‘cultivating 
the philosophic consciousness,” but religious experience 
belongs to a lower class of people, who can not ascend to 
so high a matter. One pertains to a rational culture, the 
other is a relic of pietism now gone by, with all but the 
fecbler minds. No fact presents the intellectual habit of 
our time in a more pitiable light. Tio get experience of 
ourselves, or a practical consciousness of our own little 
subjectivity, we account to be something of importance; 
but to recover, unfold, grow into, and become ennobled 
_ by, the consciousness of God, united to Him as the all-suf 
ficient object and fullness of our life—this, we think, is 
something related to weakness! And to this folly we are 
shrunk by the wretched conceit of our naturalism. What 


if it should happen to be true, that we are all inherently © 


related to God, having our summits of thought, power, 
quality, greatness in Him, made to be conscious of Him 
as of ourselves, and in that nobler consciousness to live? 
What if this too should happen to be the truth waiting our 
embrace, at the point of littleness and mere self-con- 
eviousness sharpened by our sin! How sorry the picture 
we make, when we figure it in this manner, as the super- 
lative wisdom, to have a cultivated power of self-reflection, 
and only another name for weakness to speak of religious 
experience! If I am right in the matter of my argument, 
avery different impression is justified. Mere naturalism 
it shows, in fact, to be a fraud against nature. It soundly 
authenticates the grand supernatural verities of the gospel 
and of christian experience, showing that, without them, 


v— a 


- 
ee | ite it Maat 


CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. ; 523 


there is no rational unity, even in what we call the 
universe, 

The utmost confidence may now be felt, in all the ex 
pectations and exploits of faith; in prayer, in divine ould: 
ance, in the cares of a supernatural Providence, in all the 
heaventy gifts. Clear of all reserve the disciple may 
go-to his calling, as one detained by no misgivings, or lurk: 
ing suspicions. And his success will be according to his 
confidence. Weakened by no foolish suspicion of being 
at fault, intellectually, he will go on manfully and boldl y; 
instructed always by his experience, and advancing al- 
ways upon it; removing greater mountains, as he gets more 
faith ; and giving all men to see, who chance to observe him, 
what power and luster there is in a life thus hid with Christ 
in God. Verily, such it is that we want, as the preachers 
and pastors and saints of our time; men, whose strength is 
the joy of the Lord; men who dwell in the secret place of 
the Most High; men who walk in glorious liberty, living 
no more to themselves, but to Christ who bought them; 
preaching Christ by their example, their prayers, their 
prophesyings, and witnessing by the blessed fruits of their 
faith, to its ennobling verity and greatness. 

The argument we have traced, prepares also a yet far- 
ther contribution to christian experience, in bringing more 
distinctly forward, the question of a possible discovery 
and statement of the laws of the supernatural. How 
great a change has been wrought in the creative and pro- 
ductive processes of human industry, by a scientific dis- 
covery of the laws of nature. The address we make to 
nature, and the forces of nature, is now intelligent, and 
our productive powers are as rnuch greater, as the forces 
we harness are stronger and more obedient. Tbe world 


524. HOW RELATED TO 


itself is quite another world, displaying new aid vastly 
higher possibilities. What now is wanted, in the domain 
of christian experience, is a similar development of the 
laws of the supernatural; when a correspondent change 
will be observed in the productive forces and the progress- 
ive conquests of the spiritual life. When these laws are 
once developed, the men of the kingdom will see it, as 
never before, to be a‘kingdom, and will know exactly by 
what process to be advanced and established in it. It 
will be as when alchemy gave way to chemistry, astrolo- 
gy to astronomic computations, the divining rod and other 
saws and superstitions of mining to the intelligent pros- 
pecting of geologic science, agriculture in the times of the 
moon to agriculture in the terms of experimental and 
scientific guidance. Not that any science of supernatura: 
things, or things of religious experience, is possible to be 
created, that shall prove itself in the same manner, to the 
mere natural judgment or intellect. It must be a science, 
if we use that term, that pertains to the higher realm of 
the Spirit. It must, therefore, stand in terms of analogy 
and figure, which can fully unfold their meaning only to 
minds enlightened, in a degree, by holy experience. It 
must be a contribution to faith, of the laws by which it 
may address itself to the supernatural forces of grace, and 
the manifestations of God. In the initial points of faith, 
it must approve itself to the mere intelligence; in points 
farther on, it must approve itself, more and more, to spir- 
itual insight, in its advanced stages. Hitherto there has 
been a large mixture of superstition in religious experi- 
ence. Proposing to get on by application, it has yet 
trusted more to heat than to light. It has looked for 
visions and revelations without law. It has been a kind 


cn 


CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 52 


of spiritual alchemy, taken by wonderful surprises, and 
blown up as often by fanatical explosions. The progress 
it has made has been fantastic, and it has finally reached 
the abiding place of order and sobriety, only by a long 
vourse of eccentricities and blindfold experiments. There 
has even been a kind of impression, that God himself is 
irregular, and, in some good sense, capricious in his super- 
natural gifts, therefore to be reached by no certain method, 
but only by a sort of adventure, that will some time 
chance to find Him. How different the fortunes of relig- 
ious experience, when it is regarded—which, in some fu- 
ture time, it will be—as a coming unto God by the laws that 
regulate His bestowments; when the world of His super- 
natural kingdom is conceived to be as truly under laws, 
as the world of nature, and these laws, accurately distin- 
guished, enable the disciple to address himself accurately 
to the powers of grace, as now to the forces of nature. 
Our argument favors such an expectation. It brings 
the supernatural into the grand, fore-ordinated circle of 
existence, and makes it even a central part of that stu- 
pendous whole, or integer, which we call the universe. 
It also conceives that God works by laws in the supernat- 
ural, in the incarnation and the miracles of Jesus, in his 
sacrifice and death, in the mission of the Spirit and all 
spiritual gifts. Indeed, there is no being but a bad.one, a 
sinner, that is not punctually and exactly determined by 
some law. Not even the atoms of a crystal are more ex, 
actly set by law, than the thoughts and choices of a per: 
fect mind. And though it be not any law of physical 
necessity, sach as we discover in the causalities of nature, 
itis none the less a law of unalterable and undeviating 
control. In God Himself, itis the law by which, as pre 


526 HOW RELATED TO 


siding over the thoughts, the ends, and the determinations 
of his perfect mind, the laws of nature were themse:ves 
conceived and appointed—the higher law of his goodness . 
and his moral.reason. Neither let it be imagined that 
this higher tier of law, which governs God, in his super: 
natural dispensations, is to us inaccessible or undiscernible, 
As the fall of an apple showed to Newton's eye the law 
that presides over the remotest worlds of the physical 
universe, so we shall find, not seldom, in the most familiar 
principles of duty and sentiments of religion, things in 
ourselves, that infallibly interpret Him. <A large infer- 

ence may be also derived from the admitted fact of his per- 
| fection; for, while nothing definite or certain can be pred- 
icated of imperfection, in a subject unknown as regards 
its law, the exact, ideal perfection of God, like that of the 
astronomic order, suffers a large and free deduction re. 
specting all his tempers, ends, and methods. Much also 
may be gathered from the general economy of the super- 
natural, as displayed in the work and counsel of human 
redemption. Much is given by express revelation; for,- 
though it is not common to regard, as definite and fixed 
laws of divine action, or bestowment, the familiar rules 
by which our approach to God is regulated in the scrip- 
ture, they do yet suppose that he is regulated himself by 
terms correspondent. The rule—to him that hath shall be 
given—first be reconciled to thy brother—if two of you 
shall agree as touching any thing—if our heart condenin 
us not—if a man hate his brother 


as we forgive them 
that trespass against us—if ye keep my commandment— | 
if ye search for me with all the heart—all these conditions 
of prayer, and terms of approach to God, are, in a yet 
higher view, laws of the Spirit, supposing that God’s gifts 


CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 527 


themselves are dispensable only in terms that correspond. 
And besides all these, a large discovery also can be made 
of things supernatural and their laws, by our own expe- 
rience; for, as he that loveth, knoweth God, so the whole 
life of faith is an experience and spiritual discovery of 
God. And no discovery of natural science is more valid. 
Nor is there any thing in which a ripe christian can do 
more for experimental religion, than in giving to the help 
of such as will seek after God, a treatise drawn from all 
these sources, on the laws of God’s supernatural kingdom 
—the kingdom of grace and salvation. No other contri- 
bation to the truth of Christ is so much needed, or prom- 
ises results of so great moment. First, that which is nat- 
aral, afterward that which is spiritual. It was necessary 
to this higher kind of progress, that the discoveries of 
natural science should precede, and raise the expectation 
of laws here also to be verified. And when it is done, as it 
will not be in any brief space of time, the world may begin 
to think of a general consummation at, hand. Faith will 
~ now grow solid, and overtop the temples of reason with 
its grandeur. Religious experience, conceived and proved 
to be the revelation of God, will become.a general embod- 
iment of the divine in human history, fulfilling the idea | 


of the incarnation, never till then completely intelligible. a 


There will be order without constraint, and liberty with- 
out fanaticism. The desultory will give place to the reg- 
ular, and a kind of holy skill will distinguish all the ap- 
proaches of men to God, and all the works they do in his 
name. The power of christian piety will be as much 
ereater than now, as it knows how to connect more cer 
tainly, and moré in the manner of science, with the re: 
sources of God. 


n2é& HOW RELATED 1T0 EXPERIENCE. 


Until then the highest and even truest principles of 
christian experience, are likely to involve some danger of 
fanaticism. I can not be sure that persons will not 
appear who, professing to lay hold of points advanced in 
this treatise, use them fanatically, as the fuel of their strange 
fire. Fanaticism can certainly find a shelter under it, 
and gather out of it many pretexts for extravagance 
and delusion; even as it has done in all ages, out of 
Christianity itself; but I cherish a degree of confidence, 
that what I have advanced will be a contribution rather 
to the intelligence, than to the delusions, of the christian 
world. It has been my endeavor, to put honor on faith— 
to restore, if possible, the genuine, apostolic faith. I have 
even wished, shall I dare to say, hoped, that I might do some- 
thing to inaugurate that faith in the field of modern sci- 
ence, and claim for it there that respect to which, in the 
sublimity of its reasons, it is entitled. And great will 
be the day when faith, laying hold of science and rising 
into intellectual majesty with it, is acknowledged in the 
glorious sisterhood of a common purpose, and both lead 
in the realms they occupy, reconciled to God, cleared of 
the disorders and woes of sin, to set them in that final 
unity which represents the eternal Headship of Christ. 


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Vile VEO TRE Or 


NORMAN MACLEOD, D.D., 


Minister of Barony Parish, Glasgow ; one of her Majesty's 
Chaplains, Dean of the Chapel Royal, ete. 


BY HIS BROTHER, REV. DONALD MACLEOD, B.A., 


One of Her Majesty’s Chaplains, Editor of 
: **Good Words,” etc. 


WITH STEEL PORTRAIT AND NUMEROUS YLLUSTRATIONS. 


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In less than a month after publication this Memoir reached a sale of 
SEVEN THOUSAND copies in Great Britain. It is one of the liveliest, most 
amusing, and at the same time most profitable of recent biographies, 

The volume. overflows with racy and characteristic Scotch anecdotes, 
while Dr. Macleod’s irrepressible buoyancy of spirits sparkles on every page 
and now and then breaks out in pen and ink caricatures, suggestive of 
THACKERAY in his best vein. 


@ ru Are N- Oc UC ES: 


Fron the Atlantic Monthly. 


** The life of Dr. Macleod is one of the most interesting and affecting biographies of a 
eo singularly prolific in important memotrs. It is written by his brother, the Rev. Donald 
acleod, and is beautifully written, with great tenderness, and at the same time a must 

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From the Advance. 


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dignified restraint of eulogy.’ 


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[A companion velume to Conybeare and Howson’s St. Paul.] 


The. Lifé “and Writingsaaam 
| Saint John. 


BY THE 


Rev. JAMES M. MACDONALD, D.D., 


PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY. , 
Edited, with an INTRODUCTION, by the 


Very Rev. J. S. HOWSON, D.D., Dean of Chester, 


Joint Author of ConyBEARE AND Howson’s Sr. PAuL. 


In one large handsome volume 8vo. Cloth. Price, $5.00, 


LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS, ENGRAVED EXPRESSLY FOR THIS WORK, 


Bust of Augustus. Shechem. Bust of Nero. Sardis. 
Bust of Tiberius Cassar. Czesarea Philippi. Thyatira. . Site of Capernaum. 
Bethsaida, Site of. Garden of Gethsemane. Philadelphia. Jacob’s Well. 
Jerusalem. Bethany. Laodicea, Tiberias. 
Cana of Galilee. Samaria. 3ust of Julius Cesar. —_ Pool of Siluam. 
Road from Jerusalem Bust of Caligula. Old Tyre, Bust of Vespasian. 
to Jericho. Ephesus. Bust of Titus. ' Smyrna, 
Jerusalem, Walls of St. John. Pergamos. 
Imperium Romanorum Latissime Palestine in Time of Christ. Patmos. 
Patens. Asia Minor, showing the Seven St. John’s Travels. 
Churches 


TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
I. The Place in History, and character of the pexiod in which the Apostle John appeared. 
{I. Parentage, early life, and natural traits of the Apostle. 
Iif. St. John in his early stage of preparation for the Apostleship as a disciple of John th 
Baptist. 
IV. St. John under the training of the Great Master Himself from the beginning of His public ” 
munistry. 
V. Preparation for his work from intercourse and instruction in private; especially from the 
great sacrifice offered by Jesus, as witnessed by the Apostle himself. 
VI. Crowning proof of the Messiahship of Jesus, as witnessed by St. John. 
VIL. History of St. John in the Acts of the Apostles. 
VIII. Later History froin traditionary sources, till his arrival at Ephesus, and banishment te 
Patmos. 
IX. St. John writes the Apocalypse. Its Date and Design. 
X. Analysis of the Apocalypse, with brief explanatory Notés. 
XI. ‘Traditionary History of the Apostle continued. 
XII. St. John writes the Fourth Gospel. Date, Design, and Contents. 
XIIf[. Analysis of the Gospel, with brief explanatory Notes. 
XIV. Last’ days and concluding Writings of the Apostle. 
XV. Analysis of the Epistles, with brief explanatory Notes. 


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